 We have about 40 folks registered to be here in person, so we may have some partners of ours joining us today. But I'd like to welcome you all, and everybody who's watching online. How are we at? This is the first and what we hope will become a continuing series of what I like to call conversations on key emergency management issues that we're working through here in California. My name is Eric Amaral. I am the acting deputy director to respond to operations here at the California US. And over the last couple years, have the opportunity to also serve as the acting deputy director of recovery operations. Back in June, Governor Newsom held the first ever emergency management summit on here in California. It was a phenomenal opportunity to bring together emergency managers, fire and law enforcement professionals, and city and county leadership, as well as local elected and senior leadership to talk about those issues that we're challenged with here in California when it comes to emergency management. Obviously over the last decade, what we deal with on a regular basis in California has become more and more complex. I can't help but say to bring a smile to share in the crack in space who's with us today is by all means unprecedented what we've been dealing with over the last several years. But it truly is with the impacts, climologically of what we're dealing with, with the population increases, and with a number of other struggles that we've got, the ability to respond effectively and recover from both natural and human caused disasters is becoming more and more complex. And so the purpose of the conference in June, and the purpose of today is to continue that dialogue, continue that conversation. Our hope at Cal OES and with the support of the Institute for Local Government, the California Association of Counties and the League of California Cities is to continue this dialogue on a regular basis, talking about key subjects that are important to all of us or perhaps are the greatest challenges that you're dealing with at the city and county level. And so today we're gonna start by talking about recovery. It was a component of our conference back in June. It was probably one of the most well-received seminars at that conference. And it was obvious we needed to spend more time sort of digging into what does it mean when local governments proclaim emergencies? What does it mean when you're asking for assistance to the state or federal government? What do the programs mean? What are the authorities that are in this? What are the things we can and can't do? And then, so that's gonna be the first tablet today, our Chief Counsel for Cal OES, Collin, our Deputy Chief Counsel, Jennifer Bollinger. We're gonna be speaking with you today. And they are the ones behind the scenes that help to ensure that we're maximizing the assistance that we can secure for local governments following a major disaster. They're working in close partnership with Ryan Beerus, our Deputy Director of Recovery and Recovery Team to collectively work to ensure that we're maximizing the authorities that are out there and the programs that are available to support local governments. As I said, over the last couple of years, our experience in working to secure what the state and federal assistance has grown exponentially. Just over the last two years, we've had nine major disasters, the Presidential Disaster Declaration in California. And so with that, we have learned a lot about how to sort of work the machine with the federal government, have Ryan join us as our Deputy Director of Recovery, given his long experience at FEMA, has been phenomenal to help us ensure that we're doing everything we can to support local governments. And so today's gonna be two parts. Alex and Jennifer are gonna start the day off with us talking about the process. And then I'm pleased to have with us today Sherry McCracken, the Chief Administrative Officer for Butte County and Riva Feldman, the city manager for the city of Malibu, who are both gonna provide a presentation on their experiences last year, with both the campfire and the Woolsey fire, and what that meant to their community, what are the lessons that they're taking out of this, and where are they directing their communities moving forward to be ready for that next event. Ryan Pierce, our Deputy Director of Recovery, will also be joining us to talk about where our recovery operation is going. Obviously, we are evolving our recovery operations as we deal with these ever more complex incidents, and the way we deal with housing of folks after the major disaster, the way we handle debris operations, the utilization of a multitude of other state and federal agencies through our long-term recovery framework to help cities and counties again maximize the programs and dollars that are out there. So Ryan's gonna talk a little bit about that, Riva and Sherry will speak, and then we'll end the day with the Q&A session with all three of them, where we can dig into those issues a little bit more. What I wanna make clear to everybody here in the room and online is that I want this to be a dialogue. So during Alex and Jennifer's presentation, please raise your hand and ask questions. If you've got ideas or things that you utilized in your community that have been effective, and you think others should know about that, please feel free. I want this to be an active dialogue. Online, if you've got the comments or questions, we'll ask you to email Chris Berry to my staff, chris.verry at CalOES.ca.gov, and we'll ensure that your comments and questions get incorporated into the session here today. So with that, I'm gonna hand the mic off to Alex Powell and Jennifer Bollinger. Good morning. I'm Jennifer Bollinger, I'm the Assistant Chief Counsel for CalOES. I've been here about close to four years now. I am a background of full public entity different work, litigation and work for a company. And this is Alex, how do you want to answer? So Alex, I'm the Chief Counsel here. I've been with CalOES for a little over six years. We came from the private practice and civil litigation. Just a quick story about how I kind of got into emergency management. Originally from New Jersey, and back in 2012, I was a back home visiting family, working in San Diego, and didn't expect it to be as bad as it was, of course. My family was lucky, a lot of friends and family were not, and they had some significant damage. And I remember thinking, how do communities rebound from that, right? I've never experienced that. What do you do? How do you pick up the pieces? How do you restore some sense of normalcy in your lives? And then a couple months later, there was an open year, and I thought that was a perfect opportunity to jump in. I'm very passionate about this mission. I love the work that we do, and so it's my pleasure to be here talking with you all. It's Brad about Alex. He started as a staff chomp from here, and Dr. Monroe didn't work his way up, and improved himself, and ultimately, I got appointed both by Brown and Ethan to position. So, and even, we're gonna talk about proclamations and disaster assistance. And where we're gonna head in this conversation, is we're gonna briefly address the authorities that govern the disasters and proclamation process. We'll talk about local proclamations, eventorial proclamations, what we call CDAA, California Disaster Assistance Act. Debris mentioned when an event is so large that we have something called a PPDR program and private property debris removal program. And then of course, the Stafford Act and Stafford Act decorations when the federal government steps in and becomes a federal disaster and the president's issuing emergency decks or major disaster declaration. So the authorities, the emergency services act is what governs the state of California for disaster that gets the governor brought powers to issue order, wage statutes to spend regulations. And that's where we derive the authority to issue disaster proclamations also. And then CDAA, California Disaster Assistance Act, it's the governing statutory body that provides authority for the state to come in under certain circumstances and provide financial assistance to local for certain events. And then of course, the Robert T. Stafford disaster in the emergency act. That is the federal statutory scheme that kicks in when the state ends up seeking assistance to financial assistance or direct federal assistance from the federal government or any event that becomes so large that it's beyond the state's capacity to handle on its own. So local emergency proclamations. Why does the local wanna proclaim? Well, with proclamations, it is indicating to the state that there's a situation where it's beyond the capability of the local. It can't activate pre-established emergency provisions. So if you have certain ordinances in place that are triggered by a local proclamation, you may wanna do that. And it provides immunity for certain actions and vision making when you're responding to a disaster and then of course, extraordinary state powers. And then there are four steps. Or so who can proclaim? It's the county, city and county and city. And a proclamation demonstrates that it's beyond the local's capability. And there's four steps when you wanna proclaim. You proclaim, you ratify, continue determining. The sort of things you wanna take up. So here's the timeline summary of the local proclamation. So a local proclamation can be issued by a governing body or an official identified by ordinance within 10 days of an instance. So that's critical to keep that 10 day period in mind. And then the governing body would wanna ratify the local proclamation if it was an official that issued the proclamation. And you have to do that within seven days. And then there's a renewal for every 60 days. Sometimes if the event is so catastrophic, the governor and it ends up being a state declared emergency. The governor may waive the renewal of every 60 days. I think we saw that in camp, yeah, camp. And then there's an asterisk here in January 4th, 2019. The legislature increased the renewal from 30 to 60 days. So what constitutes a local emergency? So up there, there's a paragraph that is taken right out of the statute, but essentially it's a duly proclaiming existence of conditions of disaster or extreme peril to the safety of persons of property within the limits of a city and county or county caused by such conditions. And then it lists out within the statute the types of things that you could proclaim for. But the key is here is which are likely to be beyond the capability or control of political subdivision. So that's your, as a local jurisdiction, this is how you would explain to us or demonstrate that an event is beyond the capability of your jurisdiction. I don't wanna go back real quick to something Jennifer mentioned. Under the Emergency Services Act, only a city, a county, or in San Francisco's case, a city and county can proclaim a state of emergency. That's not to say special districts couldn't proclaim, school districts couldn't proclaim, but to be a valid proclamation under the Emergency Services Act, and then there's a tie to CDAA, which we'll explain. It has to be one of those three. And then we'll explain in more detail about how the CDA process works and how you can come in as a district underneath the county that you're resting. So as Jennifer mentioned, the proclamation under the Emergency Services Act must be proclaimed only by the governing body of the jurisdiction or by an official designated in an ordinance that was enacted by that governing body. It must be ratified by the board within seven days. This again, just increased from 30 days to 60 days, but the governing body must renew that proclamation every 60 days. And then ultimately, the governing body will terminate the proclamation once conditions no longer warrant there to be a local emergency proclamation. So this is what I was talking about about the interplay between CDAA and the Emergency Services Act. So under CDAA, a local emergency is defined as a local emergency as proclaimed under section 8630 of the Emergency Services Act, which is specific to a county, a city, or a city on a county. And you must have a local proclamation that's valid under the Emergency Services Act to trigger potential CDAA eligibility. There's still a process that will undertake to review any requests for CDAA, but to even open the door, there must be a valid proclamation. So once there's a valid proclamation, the local agency may qualify for CDAA and generates a totality of the circumstances. So there are a lot of factors that we at CaliS will look at and that ranges from the fiscal capability of the jurisdiction and the budget to how many events the jurisdiction has endured over the past, let's say 12 months, assistance that it received for those events, unique circumstances of the event itself. So there are a lot of things that will play into whether a jurisdiction is eligible for, should it proceed state assistance for the disaster. Any questions on local proclamations? Yeah, go ahead. So for a special district, I'm just going to give you a minute. So for a special district, the question I have is, I understand they can't proclaim a local emergency under the ESA and they can't specifically request CDAA that way, but if there was a concentration of damages within a special district, what would be the process you'd be looking for them to kind of raise that up to the next level? So strongly worded letter to the OA, a phone call, what would be the process and the best practice you would give for that? Yeah, so certainly coordination with the OA, I don't want to pine on a strongly worded letter or a non strongly worded letter, but I would certainly everything, the way that the sub structure exists, and I can look to Eric and Ryan as well on this, is that it starts local and builds its way up and then through the OA, which is the county and then to the state. So certainly would require coordination with that OA and hopefully we're not waiting till time's a disaster to make sure that coordination is happening, that there's an ongoing dialogue, so that way in the event of a situation that impacts a special district, there's already a lot of communication through that OA, is that about right? Ryan shaking his head in the affirmative, so we're good. Eric, who's our former regional administrator as well knows. Alex, we're still gonna be looking at that, and maybe you're gonna get into this, we're gonna be looking at that operational area and their budget, even though it's maybe a district specific, we're gonna be looking at budgetary factors of the operational area as a whole. Right, correct. We wanna see all the resources that exist through mutual aid or otherwise that can assist that jurisdiction and any jurisdiction before it arrives to the level or as part of the analysis for state assistance. The transition between local proclamations and gubernatorial proclamations. So I'd have to say if it's not, the disaster is something that's readily apparent to the state, you know, massifiers breaking out and consuming thousands of acres to where we know immediately that that's gonna trigger a thought to go down the gubernatorial proclamation process. It's imperative upon the county to communicate what's going on in your jurisdiction to your regional contacts so they can filter that information up through the regional contacts to the people here so we could start making that assessment to determine whether gubernatorial proclamation is appropriate for those circumstances. So it's about the information sharing and the communication between us and your emergency coordinators. So once it reaches a gubernatorial proclamation, what does that mean? So it's found in a government code section 8558 and again that's under the Emergency Services Act. And a state of emergency means the duly proclaimed existence of conditions of disaster or of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property within the state which by reason of their magnitude are or are likely to be on the control of the services personnel equipment and facilities of any single county, city, and county or city and require the combined forces for mutual aid or reasons to combat. So it's not too different from the definition of a local proclamation, but this is, you know, as pertaining to the state of emergency. And the ESA, as we've indicated, empowers the governor to proclaim a state of emergency and it's for circumstances, conditions of disaster, extreme peril as we outlined. And the governor is, the county can request the governor to proclaim or the governor finds a local authority is beyond its capability to respond to the disaster and feels it's appropriate for the state to proclaim and provide assistance. This could be the difference between an event that is a slower moving event, maybe like a storm or it takes some time to assess damages and the local jurisdiction sort of needs to get a feel for what's out there before they would maybe proclaim and come to the state. Compare that to something like the campfire where, you know, within a matter of minutes, you know, the state was aware of how bad that event was and the governor does not need to wait for a local proclamation in order to proclaim and start moving resources. And we've seen that in some other events as well, even as recently as a couple of weeks ago where the governor was able to proclaim at the very start of an event, anticipating that something was likely to be beyond the capability of local jurisdiction, which is exactly the justification for proclaiming. Proclamation happens, it triggers certain authorities and powers under the ESA, broad powers to mitigate the effects of the disaster and the governor then has the ability to issue executive orders following a proclamation. So what does that really mean? He can suspend statutes and regulations. So often the suspensions that we see in a state of emergency, a proclamation for state of emergency is suspending the public contracting code for the state in terms of competitive bidding. Then there's critical documents, suspensions and waivers, vital records for the waiver of fees for that. He can make amend or rescind orders, commandeer private order, private property and then mission task other state agencies to assist in the response and recovery in the disaster. And that authority exists actually without a state of emergency as well. The director of Cal ESS is authorized to mission task state agencies to maybe prevent or mitigate and anticipate the impacts from a disaster. But certainly during a proclaimed emergency the director here will mission task agencies to do something within their jurisdiction, whether that's CHP or Cal Recycle to assist with debris or DTSC, the Department of Toxic Substance Control to assist with the removal of hazardous household waste. These are all things done via mission task. Following, as I mentioned, following proclamations the governor has the authority to issue executive orders and often you'll see an executive orders orders that address specific situations in a particular jurisdiction that needs addressing. So for example, one that Alex cites often is during the Napa earthquake, there was a suspension or excuse me, there was a suspension or a waiver of a ABC law for operation of wine tasting rooms to operate outside the mileage that the required to relative to their main vineyard. So they could maintain a business and build the economy back up following the earthquake. Exactly, you know, there are no two events are like, right? There's always some unique circumstance for one or another and that's like to me a great example of something that's gonna try to help bolster that local economy or mitigate the impact to the economy that region relies heavily on tourism and it's world renowned. And so to the extent there's some accommodation we can make to allow tourists to continue to put money into that area, it's really important. And that's one of the keys to recovery is to do something quickly and to buy down that prolonged from a disaster. So here's a kind of a list of just from recent executive orders or proclamations, things that you may have seen in either proclamations or executive orders. And the number one thing down that unemployment insurance that specifically called out in the emergency services act and essentially what it is is when you apply for uninsurance benefits, typically you have to wait that first week. So you were ineligible for benefits during the first week and starting week two you can receive benefits. So the governor can waive that one week waiting period so anybody who is rendered unemployed temporarily or permanently as a result of the disaster can immediately begin receiving that benefit. And again, it might seem like a little thing but having a resident of an area have money coming in could help them bolster that local economy and keep that community stable. And then as Jennifer mentioned, vital records. So the fees to replace vital records that were destroyed the governor can waive that the law imposing those fees. State agency contracting price gouging is automatically triggered on a proclamation, local land state, local governing bodies can extend that prohibition on price gouging. The governor has in certain serious events it waved it for a longer than a 30 day period at a time. And then waste of debris removal is one of the more common waivers when there's a significant number of homes down. The governor would waive rules relating to the disposal of debris so we can quickly move that debris and again restore community. And then education following the campfire we probably had the most disruption to a school district we probably have ever seen. And in late November, the governor issued a school specific executive order that cut a ton of red tape and was kind of show the state's flexibility and ability to get students back into classrooms quickly. And I think that truly most schools were back and running within a few weeks whether they were in temporary facilities or whatnot but at least minimizing the impacts of students which impacts kids in classrooms contributes to the funding for the school district it keeps the sense of normalcy for the children who were impacted. So that was a really important and novel executive order that the governor issued. Alex? Yeah. We're actually fortunate today to have the superintendent of the county office of education with us. Oh, there you go. We're going to see if Mary wanted to say a couple words about that. Thank you, Harry. Good morning, I'm Mary Sakuma, the county superintendent of schools and the mention here of the extraordinary efforts that Calloway us and so many others did on our behalf that the actions that you did on our behalf were really incredible. And a couple of examples were, so we had two school districts pretty much wiped out and there was no way that in the case of Paradise Unified that they were going to be able to get back up onto the ridge and as it turned out they weren't able to return until this past August. And so what they ended up doing was standing up schools in places like the mall office building that was near an airport so not only did the office building not meet the field act requirements of a school building but in addition we had to get an additional waiver because of its proximity to the airport. But those were a couple of examples of just extraordinary things that we were able to do. It was amazing to be a part of standing up an entire school district again in three weeks. Just essentially what happened with the holiday in between. So thanks again. The California Disaster Assistance Act. So as we previously mentioned, you have to have a local proclamation in order to valid under the ESA in order to be eligible for disaster assistance under CDAA. And what that is, it provides state financial assistance on to a governmental entities or certain private non-profits for eligible emergency activities and public infrastructure work. And CDAA is structured in a way that patterns the Robert T. Stafford Act assistance. So you look at it in terms of categories, you have emergency working of permanent work. And then approval is based on the totality of circumstances. It's just not one factor, it's a multitude of factors including cost of eligible disaster related damages per capita indicator, local physical capacity, repetitive disasters and such. And then right at the bottom, I don't know if you can see the link here, but there's a fact sheet on Cal OES website that can be accessed that describes all the factors in more detail. So as I mentioned, our public assistance, disaster assistance is that categories are broken into emergency work and permanent work. So you have to be free removal from emergency protective measures and then you have permanent work, category C through G, and we'll talk in more detail about that. But as mentioned, it's very much patterned after Stafford Act. So in the event that the disaster transitions into a federal disaster where we receive aid, we will be able to easily justify those categories for a federal assistance. Yeah, so there, just only to note on this, they're split out into emergency work and permanent work and that's intentional. So on the left side, emergency work, only the governor can authorize CDAA for emergency work, whereas the director theoretically can issue a director's concurrence and award CDAA only for that permanent work on that right side, on that right column. And then when we get into the Stafford Act, we'll talk about two types of decorations, emergency and disaster. And on emergency decorations, we're only talking about that left side, categories A and B. So yeah, we'll go through them quickly. I don't, we don't need to go into a ton of detail. I think debris removal for us is probably the most critical. It's the one we spend the most amount of time on and there are a ton of slides dedicated specifically to debris, so we'll get into that. But the gist of it is that debris removal generally is referring to debris on public property and on lands that are managed to maintain and owned by the local jurisdiction. We're not talking about private lands here. There are programs for debris removal from private property and we'll talk about that in just a minute. Emergency protective measures, these are all your response costs. Mutual aid, you know, typically it'll be law enforcement where you're dealing with evacuation and maybe overtime, things like that. These are the costs that are associated with these emergency protective measures. And their measures implemented to mitigate that immediate threat to public health and safety. So that's that immediate response to a disaster. Hey, I'd like to jump in real quick on that. So on, if you go back to the last slide. So what's important on this category B emergency protective measures for jurisdictions that have received fire management assistance grant. Obviously as we transition into the recovery phase, if you've received an FMAC during a firefight and we're gonna, as Ryan's team's doing the calculations, we're gonna pull out all of these costs and associate into that FMAC. So when you're looking at your overall cost of the disaster, these emergency protective measures are gonna get tied back to that FMAC in large part. So it's important to understand as you're working with our regional teams doing your individual damage assessments, looking at the overall cost of the disaster if you've received an FMAC. I think we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment to understand that those get factored out. They can't be counted twice. And well, yeah, once we get into the federal side there's not a slide on it but I will explain what an FMAC is as well. So just reason through the categories here, C, our roads and bridges, similar to offsetting costs for FMAC, if a road is eligible for federal highway administration costs, then those are gonna be backed out of the calculation towards your total, whether or not. And that'll play into whether or not the state is eligible for federal assistance and I'll get into those thresholds in just a bit. Category D, water control facilities. Likewise, if it's subject to their jurisdiction of another federal agency, then FEMA will not fund it. So for instance, if it's in an Army Corps program then that's what's gonna provide funding for any damage. Water control facilities, utilities, and then parks rec and other facilities. So those are all the categories of assistance. So what happens right after a disaster? The local jurisdiction has to verify its damages and this is really where Ryan's team comes into play. He's got a team of emergency service coordinators and disaster assistance specialists that get deployed into the field and essentially embed with local jurisdictions to assess these damages. And so what a local jurisdiction would first do is assess damages and enter it into web EOC or Cal EOC, I believe it's called. And then the state will help validate these damages and it's that validation that's critical because that's what ultimately determines the level of agreed upon damages. If we're dealing with a potential federal event, a federal government will be part of that team. So it's state, local, and fed. It'll all assess the damages, come up with an agreed upon amount for uninsured losses to public facilities, put them into each category of assistance that we just talked about and that becomes the PDA, the Preliminary Damage Assessment and that is what drives the request for public assistance in a major disaster declaration which will get empty. But that's key, an accurate and thorough assessment of damages. At your level, we won't as a state and the fed won't as a federal government know whether assistance is warranted. So this is absolutely critical and when we're talking about a federal event, we're on a tight timeline to make a request unless we request an extension. So the sooner you can access these areas to validate damages, the better. Now, we understand there's some areas that might be inaccessible due to flood or snow or something like that and that could justify a request for an extension of time for the federal government but we need to operate under the assumption that there will be no extension and that will have validated damages very soon after an event. Okay, we talked about this as well that the director can issue CDA for permanent work, the governor can issue for either emergency or permanent work and who's eligible to proclaim under the ESA. From time to time it comes out whether an incorporated town is included in the definition of city so that's why we threw that definition in there. I think it's come up twice or three times since I've been here, so this is something to know. So our CDA regs essentially mirror the federal government's regs for public assistance and this is a really critical slide right here. If it's a state-only event, the requirement is that you follow your own rules. However, the federal procurement rules which we'll talk about in a bit are very, very stringent, especially for local governments, more so than state governments and they're tricky and it's the number one point for the obligation refining from the OIG if they come into audit. So procurement is absolutely critical. Our regs actually say that to the extent that there may be federal funding available, a local jurisdiction must follow the federal procurement rules. And so what happens for a local government is that you have to follow your rules and the federal regs and to the extent there's a conflict you must follow the more restrictive or more difficult rule to follow. It's really tricky. And so if FEMA does their presentations, they'll actually give examples of which is more restrictive and it's really difficult sometimes to even figure that out. But that's a critical component of post-disaster recovery because any defect in contract or procurement is gonna put you at a disadvantage should there be an audit. So that's why we recommend that you follow the federal rules. And then generally the cost share for CDA if you're granted that is 75% which means that the local jurisdiction will bear the 25% non-state share of CDA. So it's a pretty simple calculation. It's a little trickier if we're dealing with federal funds. And again, we'll talk about that in just a bit. So I've got a couple of pictures before we get into debris removal, but you can see the picture on the slide right now is Coffee Park before and after the 2017 North Bay Fires. It's a pretty powerful picture if you take a look. The next slide that you're gonna see here, this is a staging area following the 2017 North Bay Fires of burnt vehicles. Thousands and thousands of vehicles that were burned, they're essentially shells on the vehicle that were staged so that the crews can remove actual structural debris from properties. But to me that picture is pretty telling. You can't really tell what vehicles when one starts and another begins. And we're talking about this on a scale of thousands and thousands of vehicles. And then here's just a close-up picture of one vehicle on a property. This is from 2015 in Lake County, the Valley Fire. I have debris removal from publicly and privately owned lands and water undertaken by the state in response to an emergency as eligible for state financial assistance. Private property debris removal may be authorized when there's an immediate threat to public health and safety. And the critical thing to take away from that statement is that it needs to be a threat to public health because the state does not typically go into private properties and remove the debris that's typically incumbent upon the landowner and it has to be an extraordinary circumstance for the government to come in and do a private property, dirty removal, excuse me, stumbling over my words today. And then that often will necessitate a proclamation from your local health officer about the threat to public health. And then there's the assessment of whether the state needs to come in and assist in that manner. And so the CDA regulations talk about debris removal and then talk about private property debris removal. And the default rule is that removal of debris from private property is ineligible for CDA. So that is the default rule, right? We're only talking about public property. The exception is if there are circumstances that are so severe, perhaps a high concentration of homes that were burnt in a certain area may be impacting the watershed or just the shared volume of debris poses a threat to the public at large, then the state could consider authorizing reimbursement for debris removal from private property. Same with the federal government, we'll go into their criteria in a minute. But the key there is that it's still a reimbursement program just like any project under CDAA. So the default is if we authorize it then the local jurisdiction could engage in a private property debris removal and submit for reimbursement. Only when there are truly extraordinary, the worst of the worst sort of events would the state come in and actually in the form of like a direct state assistance remove that debris. So it's really critical that jurisdictions understand the scope of PPDR, what the rules are and build a local capability to actually engage in this sort of a program because most events would not warrant the state to actually come in and do that. And while we can provide technical assistance it's really important that the local jurisdictions understand what it takes to run a debris of the removal program. Yeah, and should the locals undertake such a program the regulations require that the local jurisdiction secure a right of entry form meaning that they are authorized to go into the private property and remove that debris. And within that right of entry form there needs to be a whole harmless agreement. But from the owner of the property to the local jurisdiction and the state saying that the local and state are absolved of any liability or negligence or damage to the property. And then the local jurisdiction or the excuse me and then the private property or the private owner, the home owner and the local jurisdiction needs to avoid duplication of benefits. So overview of private property debris removal there are both state and federal programs that could allow this. It is actually considered public assistance it's not individual assistance. Reason being is that the justification for engaging in that kind of a program is that there's a threat to the public at large and you need to remove that debris to mitigate that threat to the public at large. So this is not considered individual assistance under either the state or the fed programs. As Jennifer mentioned, you need a right of entry and demarcation at home or harmless. And there's a spot on the existing or we right of entry template that we've all used that has a spot for insurance but it will be the local jurisdictions obligation to pursue insurance proceeds because those would constitute a duplication of benefits. And that's a requirement both in the state and the federal programs. We typically get a lot of questions when these programs are rolled out or town hall meetings and people say, well, I owe money, am I gonna be out of pocket for this? The short answer is no, but your insurance proceeds the government would take your insurance proceeds to the extent there are insurance proceeds you're marked for debris and remaining after the debris removal has happened. Now, homeowners would be able to use that debris insurance proceeds for things that are not covered under the debris program, but if they have no other expenses and there are funds on the policy you're marked for debris and ensure the government would collect that back and typically it's gonna be cents on the dollar compared to the cost of the debris removal. So it's not in that pocket but it is a recruitment money from the insurance policy. And then in order to get private property debris rule request to us, you'll have to demonstrate that there is an immediate threat to public health and safety under the federal guidelines. There's gotta be some sort of cognizant official that can make that determination. It almost always is the local health officer and it's always done via a local health emergency under health and safety code 101-080. And this is critical. It's a way that, because we are not health experts, right? We're gonna rely on those health experts. So if there's a local health officer that is proclaiming the existence of a health emergency due to the volume of the hazardous debris, then that's gonna carry weight in our evaluation. And one of the bases as well could be economic recovery. So it could be that you need to remove that debris for instance to restore the economy of the local economy in that jurisdiction. And that's gonna be one of the factors that will weigh into whether or not that program's approved. So the local considerations when you're undertaking a private property through debris removal program is having taken the steps prior to the disaster occurring of having contractors in place or potential contractors in place for the debris removal program. And then when you're responding to the actual emergency and undertaking the debris removal, sometimes debris ordinances are necessary. So the ordinances need to be consistent with the public health emergency and the threat to the environment. And make sure that the local jurisdictions are not allowing individual property owners to reenter into the areas that are deemed a threat to the public before the debris is actually removed from the property. And then of course, as Alex mentioned, the insurance collection that we have to avoid the duplication of benefits. Yeah, that should be, yeah, that should do. Essentially what you wanna do is in that ordinance you're gonna identify, typically a timeline by which a homeowner who does not wanna participate in the consolidated government run program to opt out, do their own cleanup. But they're gonna be strict timelines that the homeowner would need to clean by and the local jurisdiction must be ready to abate all properties that have not complied. So if you have a homeowner that has left property there and it's potentially posing that threat to public health and safety or watershed, they're gonna be subject to abatement. Question? What was the question? The question was, has Cal OES provided templates of those ordinances or providing recommendations on who wants to emulate? So I don't know if we've officially provided them. We have just over the years worked with jurisdictions. So I do have many of them. We have our own kind of guidebook that we sort of rely on and certainly able to share that. In fact, following the 2017 North Bay Fires started as daily calls and then every other day and then a couple of days a week and then weekly calls with every, either county council or city attorney of an impacted jurisdiction. So there was like 15 folks on the call every day talking through all of these issues ordinances. And then in a car fire, which was July of 2018, county council and city attorney for Reading worked with Sonoma because they had just gone through with us many a year earlier. And then this year we're working with Butte County. I know that their county council had worked with Sonoma. So certainly there is this sort of neighbor helping neighbor approach on the legal side as well. And I'm happy to share any template. Those are all right, in ordinances public. So happy to share any of that that will be useful to jurisdiction. But I think that's a key, that coordination and collaboration with folks who have gone through it is key on any disaster there. Alex, I just wanted to remind everybody Sherry McCracken is in the room with us today. And she's got plenty of templates that I'm sure she'd be happy to share with all of you, as I'm sure Reva would as well. So certainly looking to the folks that have been through it. And one of the other things I wanted to touch on and I'm sure Ryan will touch on this a little bit further when he speaks is to help everybody to understand that our ability at the state level or the federal government level to do debris operations is not unlimited. So we are going to look at there are not clear cut defined thresholds on when we will be able to come in and do debris removal. So that's something that we will look at is what is your capability, understanding that we will throw all the technical expertise and experience to your team to help you. But we certainly want to see California as a whole get to a point where there's a greater capability at the local government level to do these debris management operations, understanding that those very large operations in 17 and 18 where the ability to get a community back on its feet quickly requires sometimes the state or federal government to come in. But there's a lot of events that we deal with that are a much smaller universe. And so that's a conversation we need to collaboratively have before there's the expectation that the state or federal government's gonna come in and take care of that. Thanks, Eric. And to put in perspective of just the sheer scale of some of these disasters. So in 2015 we had a federally declared event 4240 which encompassed the Butte Fire and Calvary's Amidore counties, the Valley Fire and Lake County. Collectively between those two massive fires we had just under 2,000 homes destroyed. North Bay fires in 2017, we were over 6,000. And in the Camp Fire alone in Paradise we were talking over 18,000 structures. So when we talk about the threat to public health and safety, it's not a few hundred homes. We're talking thousands of homes that literally blanketed the entire community with hazardous debris. And it's that sort of a justification that would allow private property debris removal with public funding, if that makes sense, right? It's not just a few homes scattered. It is a high concentration widespread public threat. So this presentation we're probably gonna explore emergency declarations and major disaster declarations. But it's noteworthy that there's also another assistance available under the Stafford Act and that's FMAG for fire management assistant grant declaration. And that is triggered when there is a fire happening and it reaches such a significant threat threshold that the federal government is willing to lean in and provide assistance to help combat the fire situation before it expands its magnitude. Real quick, noteworthy on the FMAG, sorry. You have one shot to request that thing. And so you have to, there's gotta be an event that looks that that could warrant a major disaster deck if the fire burned away, it does, but you can't wait until after the fire is burnt to request that. And the whole idea is that they'll provide this assistance to mitigate that, what would otherwise potentially be that major disaster declaration. And to colligate those requests are verbal over the phone and then the paperwork followed after the request is made and the verbal approval is provided. So like I said, emergency declarations and major disaster declarations, those declarations authorize the president to provide supplemental federal assistance. And the amount of assistance to go is dependent upon the two declarations. So an emergency declaration, any occasion or instance for which in the determination of the president, federal assistance is needed to supplement state and local efforts and capabilities to save lives and to protect property, public health and safety or to the lesser or a burden of threat of a catastrophe to any part of the United States. So as we covered earlier in the charts, we have, if you remember the two charts, you had the degree of removal and emergency protective measures and then you have the emergency work. So here we're looking at the emergency protective measures and the degree of removal on that left side of the chart. Yeah, so typically these come at the front end of a disaster or shortly before a disaster. You see these a lot on the east coast as a hurricane is coming in and they know it's gonna come and they can kind of time it and they'll maybe request an emergency declaration ahead of time so they can receive some sort of emergency protective measures to mitigate that threat. California unfortunately is a no notice state for the most part. Once in a while we'll have a really bad weather event like we saw a couple weeks ago where there was pretty certain that there were gonna be fires during that really severe fire weather condition. We also saw the near failure of the oracle dam spillway. That was the first emergency declaration at least in my tenure here that we secured. Just given the mass amount of folks who were evacuating at one time, obviously the potential catastrophe that would have occurred had that fell. And then we've had a few since when there were massive evacuations or really bad fire, campfire for instance, we were able to secure one of these just to get additional firefighting assets or commodities for shelters when you knew that there were gonna be a lot of folks displaced. But for the most part these are more rare than what Jennifer's about to talk about. Of course it's fine for you up there but it's a natural catastrophe regardless of the cause and it's of such magnitude to warrant a system under the staffer doc from the president and the federal government. So this is the type of assistance that's available under the major disaster declaration. So if you give, think back to the chart that we set for us for you under CDAA to start clearing those categories as well. So you have the left side of the emergency work and then you also have permanent work. But what's also significant for major disaster declarations is that you have individuals available under major disaster declarations. So it includes housing, mass care and sheltering, emergency assistance, crisis counseling, a disaster unemployment, there's the hazard mitigation grant program disaster declarations end up. Yeah, so the way that the HMGP program works is the state receives back, depending on the calculation either 15 or 20 cents on the dollar of every dollar that constituted that major disaster declaration. So on a billion dollar revenue talk about $150 million or $200 million that comes back to the state in the form of a hazard mitigation grant that any local jurisdiction could apply for. It's not limited to just the jurisdiction where the event was declared. So it's statewide, it's a really tremendous program that we administer here. It's federal dollars that go back to the locals to ideally build the capability to mitigate harm from a future event. So hopefully you folks are familiar, if not I would definitely become familiar. Ryan will be your point on this but it's a really important program. So there are two different analyses that occur for public assistance and individual assistance. Public assistance generally is gonna be driven by the cost of the event. So California's indicator is somewhere around $57 million of uninsured public infrastructure damages from an event. It's a really, really high number of highest in the nation given our population. And so this is where I'm talking about where the local jurisdictions must identify these damages and get concurrence from the state and the federal government on the cost of the repair or replace. So what happens is the state has to reach approximately $57 million in order to be eligible for a major disaster declaration. In addition, each county that we're seeking to have included in that major declaration must meet their own indicator. So you could have a situation where the state gets in with a $57 million threshold but included in that $57 million are a couple of counties whose numbers contribute towards that total but did not meet their individual indicators. And that happens once in a while especially with larger counties that have really, really high thresholds per capita thresholds. Individual assistance is a totally different analysis. There is no preset number that you have to hit in order to get there. I think in the past we've looked at 800 to 1200 homes as sort of a rough minimum and then you kind of have to sell why it's justified. So there could be concentration of damages, trauma to the community, socioeconomic status of the community, all those types of things contribute. Just recently though FEMA updated its criteria and they have a new formula that's based on total taxable resources of the state in California that increased the indicator or the threshold theoretically for individual assistance. We have not requested individual assistance since this rule came into effect. I think it was just this past spring. So June, yeah. So we have yet to see really what that difference is but we certainly are aware of recent events that may not have had the same outcome if we're calculating with this new criteria. So this is something we're watching very closely. Hopefully we don't need to request anything because we have a nice, I don't want to use the Q word but I'll say it's quiet sort of time for it's California. But we'll see what happens when we make our next request for that. Yeah. Just give everybody an example of the Napa earthquake would not have been declared under this new criteria. A lot of the flood and events earlier this spring would not have been declared under this new criteria. So these are things that were declared. Can't fire 2017. That was iffy, if that would have met the metric at least in the early stages. So what Alex is saying is this has potentially huge complications for the state. And I know that folks are talking generally not just in California that it's sort of brand new. We'll see how it all works but certainly something to keep an eye on. So the federal debris removal program similar to what Jennifer was talking about on the state side there's gotta be a demonstration that there's an immediate threat to public health and safety. And then also they'll take into account economic recovery as a basis for approving that kind of a program. Again it's public assistance not individual assistance and they require the rights of entry and that you avoid duplication of benefits. So duplication of benefits can be in many forms most commonly it's gonna be insurance. So when you're running a debris program every homeowner theoretically would have insurance for most will and most of those will also have debris coverage. And so that's where a lot of your efforts are gonna be focused. But there could be other programs as well that constitute duplication. So if you have a flood control facility that's under Army Corps like I mentioned that will be ineligible. And then recently we're kind of seeing this play out but there's also provision in the Stafford Act regulations that says a negligent third party that caused the condition for which disaster funding was expended would constitute a duplication of benefits and that there is an obligation of the local government to pursue those costs from a negligent third party. So. And with the state to try to retain any as a result of negligence of a third party and it very much patterns the federal regulations. Yeah. And this is a that's a heavy lift. I mean, we're talking, you know, 15,000 homes or 14,000 whoever have ever been the outfit in and pursuing insurance proceeds from every one of those homeowners. It's a lot of work. Some jurisdictions contract out that task to a subrogation firm. And that could be eligible. Could be an eligible expense towards the disaster as well. But before you undertake that obviously could coordinate with us if it's a federal event with FEMA as well we'll make sure that everybody's on the same page. And then the cost share. So generally when federal assistance comes in it's at 75, 25% cost share rate. And then we, the state will kick in 75% of the 25% with CDAA funding. So the way that the breakdown typically will look is 75% from the federal government, 18.75% from the state and then the local jurisdiction would have six and a quarter percent as their cost share. So as I mentioned, probably the number one finding with audits and maybe Ryan could confirm this is relating to procurement and contracting. Again, it's very complicated and it's very important. On the left, the state has it relatively easy. The state follows its own contracting rules and has to include a series of contractual provisions that are set forth in the regulations. On the right side of that column it's a lot more tricky. So for local government you have to follow your local rules to the extent there are state rules that apply to you. You follow those and you follow two CFR 200.318 through 326. And when your councils are reviewing these to the extent that there's anything between 318 and 326 that conflicts with the local rule you have to compare them, de-dub them and follow the more strict path. So it's a really tricky, difficult thing but it's important and you don't wanna be in the business giving money back that you receive from for disasters. So that's key and I would also say I should have said this during debris. Debris is probably the most complicated and costly part of our recovery operation and there are obviously contracts that are affiliated with those things. So your debris contracts, it's a double whammy. It's a highly, highly, well it's a high price tag on the debris. Procurement's always gonna be audited and debris contracts will always have some scrutiny. So make sure that those things are solid, that you vetted them through your council and that you've complied with the procurement rules under the Stafford Act regulations. And then when there's not a federal event, or sorry, like a major disaster or an emergency deck, there are still other types of programs that you can seek relief from through the federal government and that's run through our office. So one could be the small business administration. You can get low interest loans for businesses and homeowners. And then the U.S. Department of Ag has disaster programs that'll provide funding for lost crops or something that resulted from an event that did not warrant necessarily a major disaster declaration. This could still be on the table as assistance. And then we talked about the hazard mitigation. Again, a really critical program that we administered that gives money right back to you all to build up better capabilities and to be able to withstand future disasters. So in the last several years, how the U.S. has really put its mission forward, we've seen an extraordinary amount of emergency proclamation, presidential emergency decorations and major disaster deck decorations. So here's some statistics that we've met, if you will, unfortunately, and we've all been extremely busy responding to the disasters over the last couple of years. So we've had 11 major disaster decks, five presidential emergency, 75 plus cumulative state of emergency based upon the timeline up there. And then we see fires, storms, earthquakes, disease outbreaks, gas outbreaks, air attacks throughout many more. Yeah, so definitely, you know, no two events are alike. There's always something new. There's no shortage of disasters that strike California. I want to just point out a few things. One, that 75 plus gubernatorial, it's sort of a misleading number. The numbers of events is way higher than that because that'll be like one proclamation. Within one proclamation, you can have a dozen fires that are listed out. Even a couple weeks or two weeks ago, we had the TIC and the Kincaid fires, two separate events, obviously different counties, but within one proclamation. So that's an example of one proclamation equals two events or at least two separate fires. And that goes on through most of these. And if you look at the recent trend, nine out of the 11 presidential disaster decks were in the past two and a half years and all five emergency decks that we've seen at least since 2014 have been in that same time period. So certainly a pretty busy time for all of us folks here. So speaking of things that we're always seeing new in events, does anybody know what that is? Firenado, right? So in 2018, July 2018 in the Car Fire, there was actually, I mean it's called a fire world. I think it was referred to as a firenado or a fire tornado. But so evidently within fires, you can have essentially weather systems or winds that are created within the fire itself. And this is one that occurred in the campfire or in the Car Fire rather in 2018. And National Weather Service officially designated this as a fire world with wind speeds equivalent to an EF-3 tornado, 140 plus mile an hour winds within a fire. And you actually had damage within that fire gravity who had wind damage to homes that were not necessarily burned the way that neighboring homes would have been. But damage nonetheless as if it was a catastrophic tornado. When we requested that major disaster decoration, it was actually approved for two types of events. It was a fire event and a wind event. And they looked at them separately because there were damages attributed just to that wind. So it's not just, we're not just saying that when we say never know what we'll see and there's no two events are alike. This was certainly something that I hadn't worked on before and it was novel to me. So kind of a telling tale of what we're seeing in these past few years. And then this is our contact information, Jennifer and me. So if you have any questions down the road, always feel free to email or call and happy to take questions now or hang out for after the other presentation. So we are ahead of schedule. We're gonna take a 15 minute restroom break and allow folks to get coffee and refreshments on the side of the room. But we've got more than enough time for questions right now for Alex and Jennifer. So if you've got questions for them. Thank you, Alex. I think we've put you through the ringer with the campfire and I have to tell you, it is so important to have your council working with Alex and his crew and stay in lockstep because we weren't in the beginning. I think we are now though, so thank you, absolutely. Any other questions in the room? Okay, then we're gonna take a 15 minute break. Let's come back here at around 9.35. The restrooms for anybody that needs them are directly behind us in the hall. There's also a filter water dispenser out there if you've got a water bottle that you wanna refill, you can do that out there. And we'll be back here around 9.35. Thanks. We're gonna start our afternoon group. It's gonna start with Ryan Beerus, our deputy director of recovery and then transition over to some perspective from both city and county level from 2018. But we're gonna start first with Ryan Beerus, our deputy director of recovery. But I think it's only about six months on the job with us who brings to Cal OES and the state of California a phenomenal experience from the federal side in terms of disaster recovery. So I'm gonna turn it over to Ryan. First off, I have not been here for even four months. July 22nd, it was my first date. Good morning, everyone. I do have a lot of experience on the federal side. I was with FEMA for over a decade, working recovery in front office. And I was deployed in the field probably 80% of the time. So including working the 2017 and 18 wildfires here in California as the housing lead for FEMA working alongside Eric and others from the state. I liked it so much. I chose the better profession coming here to work for California. So it's my honor to be here. And I can say that people here and working with many of people in the room like Sherry and others has been a joy. You don't really get that when you have that FEMA shirt on. You definitely get a different response when you go into counties and cities. But before I go into just what I know for 2017 and 18 and some lessons learned, I am gonna turn it over to my assistant director for recovery operations, Grady Joseph. He has to leave at 10 o'clock and I just wanted him to speak some of the technology, things that we're looking at for the state. So Grady, good afternoon, good morning everybody. Sorry, I'm still getting used to the time change. I was on the East Coast all weekend. So anyway, what I wanted to kind of chat with you guys a little bit about today. Ryan's been here for about four months. I've been here for a little over two months and what we both worked on primarily while on the federal side was an effort to make sure that we have data interoperability across jurisdictions, right? So when we're looking at it from a national perspective, we've got 50 states, obviously about 3,500 counties, 16 territories and over 400 tribes in the United States of America. So we wanna get to a place where we can begin capturing data once and reusing that throughout the rest of the recovery process. So that starts up at the initial damage assessment, our estimate, so what we have been attempting to kind of put into place since we've been here, we've done two IDs since I've been here of the most recent one being for the concaved fire in Sonoma. We wanna get to a place where we can gather information at the first touch with the locals, with you guys and give you guys the ability to capture that data as well so that we can then move that into say public assistance, individual assistance, right? So if we've gone out with the SBA and done an assessment of a home and noted that that's been destroyed, we have imagery that supports that. We have all the requisite information. Why should we not just be able to roll back directly into housing assistance through the SBA or FEMA's individual assistance program when that comes into a play. So we're really trying to get better and focus on areas where we can improve how we do our operations. That goes into everything from the IDE side all the way out to when you folks are asking for disbursements for your PA grants, right? We wanna be able to cut down the amount of touches and the amount of paperwork that you all have to contend with because we believe in first and foremost making sure that the customer experience you guys are the customers for us, right? We wanna make sure that that's as efficient as effective as possible. So more to come on that as we kind of get our feet wet with the different recovery operations and begin to build on that but that is somewhere something that we're definitely moving towards. So we wanna be a lot more predictive. We wanna be a lot more conscious of your time and energy and whatnot and basically free up resources so that we all collectively can focus on the recovery and making sure that we're making the best decisions for local communities as they begin to recover. So any questions on kind of where we wanna go and where we've been? Ryan and I both worked on the modernizing of the public assistance program. So that's been kind of a big focus for us and then damage assessment assessments nationally as well. So really just trying to bring those lessons learned and those experiences into California and ideally improve business processes for the entire state to make everything a little bit more effective for us. Thank you. Don't really have nothing prepared because I read Alex's brief yesterday and I was like, well, I don't even need to speak on recovery because he just covered it for you all. So if there's any questions on recovery, you ask Alex, he's got us covered. I'm gonna talk just some lessons learned real quick at least lessons that we at the state learned or I learned personally. The path forward of how I plan on leading the recovery team here in the states working closely with everyone in this room and Reeve, I actually owe you a visit from my meeting a couple of months ago. I did not forget that. I've been telling Pune we need to get to Malibu and why would we not want to go there? So I am working on that. And then I wanna turn it over to Pune who leads my interagency recovery coordination division. I think this is gonna be the future of how we approach disasters, particularly with, Alex just mentioned, IA may be a little more difficult to get. PA, $57 million is a large threshold but that doesn't mean that there's not assistance out there. So we have this team with six RSFs and she's gonna kind of go over that. And for the first time ever, I'm sure Sherry, I've seen your slides too but if you could just mention some things about the recovery support functions and your experience, good and or bad, I would like for everyone to hear it including myself. So I went to the NEMA conference two or three weeks ago in Idaho and we were at the OR&R session and it was an hour and a half long and I don't know how many people were in the room. It was quite a few and FEMA was talking individual assistance and then they were like, these are our metrics. Just to give you some metrics, which were one metric that they mentioned which was alarming to me. Their metric for sheltering is 14 days. If anybody's still in shelters after 14 days they get alarming, whether they get alarmed or they say the county or city can't handle it, the state needs help. Apparently they've never ever responded to a fire because a fire is months, we just, well, a year in this case, having shelters open. So that was one thing they mentioned. They also mentioned housing, of how their housing program, they're gonna bring in all these travel trailers and mobile homes and they wanna be innovative but they really can't. So, but once again, they have never worked fires. They've never worked mudslides. They've never apparently visited the state of California because lots are small, space is precious and there's different codes here. For instance, when they were bringing in the manufactured homes and luckily I already left this disaster as a Fed December 21st because of the shutdown because if not it would be my fault. But they brought in mobile homes that never even met the state or local code. So when you go into a sales program at the end of this hopefully maybe given somebody a potential use of a unit, they can't even purchase it because it doesn't even need code. That's a big lesson to learn. We should never accept anything, Alex, in the future that doesn't meet our code. And you were probably not even aware of that probably those are discussions. Another thing with shelters we've learned is all the pop-up shelters, nationally this is a problem but particularly with 17 and 18, we had the Walmart pop-up shelter here and that creates its own coordination effort. Several churches were popped up. This recent incident and for the Kincaid fire, we had some of our subcontractors open up their base camp to sheltering which we quickly had to intervene and make sure that they went to the proper sheltering. So that's one thing a big lesson learned is every, in the end everybody wants to help, right? But coordinating that and not going to those assigned shelters does become problematic in large events. Debris, I haven't really seen it in 17 and 18, but particularly in floods and we are prone to flood and events here in the state. We just have to watch out. There's a lot of scam orders that come out for debris, particularly the muck up. So that's one thing. And we've seen some of it in 17, not too much in 18 people trying to clean up at the dime of somebody that just lost everything, which is said, another lesson's learned from 17 to 18. I don't know if I could say it, but I'm going to anyway. We do it, when it comes to a federal cleanup, I think we do it better than the feds. In 18, we not only were quicker, we also did it cheaper by $700,000 per parcel. And I think that's just to the testament to not only Cal OES, but also working with the county. The county has been great in the town. The ROEs is a big lesson's learned. I mean, Sherry can definitely speak to it when she mentions it, but you know, Sherry had, she's the county, then you have the town of Paradise and who's going to control that ROE process? Who's going to set up those ROE centers? How many town halls do you have to have to get all of these ROEs in? And she received over 11,000, I think it was 809 to be exact, ROEs in a pretty quick timeframe. So, but that's the nature of a cleanup. ROEs are critical. And we're doing it round two with trees. That was another lesson's learned. I think, but particularly up north, not so much down south in it, but you know, when you have a debris cleanup, you have all these trees that were burned down that's still part of the potential right away. Early on though, we didn't really capture all of that with the ROEs and didn't have that language. We didn't have it approved. So now we have to go into phase two of the cleanup, which I don't know if it would have changed the timeframe of the cleanup, but it would have definitely prevented round two of collecting right of entries, which is just never, never fun. Alex mentioned the debris cleanup, but you know, we picked up in 17, 3.6 million, exceeded 3.6 million tons of debris already. I mean, that's, it's more than the World Trade Center by double. It's almost 600,000 elephants for those that can visualize that. And the reason I mentioned that is I've reviewed 12 debris management plans from counties and a lot of people have this notion of where they're gonna put the debris. And I think you just have to visualize that many elephants. And then when you write your plan, see if those elephants fit where that's going. On housing, nobody wants to talk about housing, even pre-event, we have a housing crisis in the state. We have affordable housing problem in the state. And when you lose 14,000 homes like Sherry did or Coffee Park, that was I think 1,500 homes, you have to talk housing. When we do have an IA incident, like we will if it's 2,000 plus, I think the metric's 2,500 now, just to let y'all know. It used to be 800, I think it's 2,500 now. Is, you know, you're gonna quickly have people talking or coming to you about being innovative and setting all these new things up and these, I don't know what you call the many houses, what's it? Tiny homes, yes. You know, when they come with you a big book and they say, hey, not only can you have this tiny home, then you can build your house and then you can rent a home and then you go to the county and you're like, what, I'm not perfect for that. So it sounds good. But all of that is, you can't really do that post incident. You have the ones that want to do the 4D type homes. They want to, they have this module that they can go rent this or buy this empty building and have all these 3D plantings and quickly do things, which I've never done before. What I'm trying to get at is this has to be all done pre-incident. Post incident, there's three things you can do and this is, it's, within the confrins of being innovative, this is housing. You can buy it, you can build it, or you can repair it. That's the three things you can do in housing. So when you lose something, when you lose everything, you're not buying anything. All these other programs you hear about, family, multifamily repair. Well, it's burned to the ground. There's really nothing to repair. They want to, at the time, we had a step program which you can shelter in place, which they removed, which I'm convinced we will have it in the incident of earthquake, but there's nothing to live in. That's another big program for FEMA. The federal programs for housing are built for floods. It's built for a hurricane. It's built for the Gulf Coast. It's built so where something can come in, the water exceeds, the wind dies down, you put up a trailer, you mark and build your house, and the trailer leaves in six months. That's what the federal housing programs are for. If you haven't been to a housing mission before, it's the most political thing you will ever get involved in. It's the most personal thing you will ever get involved in and it's the most, I mean, I personally love it. I did it for 15 years at the national level and I still love it here today. It's a challenge, but the biggest lessons learned that I can say is start thinking of it now because one day it is going to impact wherever you sit. Another thing we learned is NIMBY, not in my backyard. When these disasters occur, sometimes you have to build communities. They're called group sites or commercial pads. But when you build the group sites, you bring in all of this infrastructure, you bring all the units in, and then you have to go to the cities and say, hey, I wanna use it in this vacant lot. Well, it goes to the city council and they're like, mm, that's not happening here. I don't want those people staying there. I don't know what that means. I love when people say it around me. I am one of those people. I did lose my home in Katrina, so did my family. I think I'm a pretty good person, so I don't know what that means, but I can tell you what it means to me is during Katrina, you had all those news clips happening way over here whether they were doing drugs or meth labs or whatever they were doing in their units, and that's the perception that's out there right now. We have to clean that perception up. So one of the biggest lessons learned, not only for this disaster, but just nationally, is as you speak to your county and your city and whoever that is, let's just make sure that those people are the people that lost their houses. We have very few crime in the group sites that are being managed right now. I think the number's definitely less than 1%. Probably no different than it would have been if that was a community standing before the incident. Disaster case management. I'm actually gonna let Sherry get into this. It didn't, it just, it's slow. It's a needed action, but I can say it doesn't really work as well as it should. We're dealing, I'm not stuttering. I'm just trying to be, anyway, Sherry, you can get tomorrow into disaster case management. The quirky thing with disaster case management is they use this formula from the Fed side and they think these are the numbers, like it's 10, I think it's 35 to one. But the problem, so it's one case management for 35 people. The problem though is that there's a bunch of numbers out there. We're dealing with something right now. The number of people that have not been served or case managed is from 826 to 8000 and no one can agree to the number, but the only one that FEMA's gonna allow us to go with is of course the one that's less than 900. So that's one thing Sherry and I are working right now. And it is pivotal that it's such a great thing. It addresses the unmet needs, but it seems like every incident we could always improve disaster case management. Elected officials is another lesson learned, particularly for everyone in this room and myself is we have to quickly make sure that we're communicating with them. We have to quickly ensure that when they're calling, whether it's the governor's office or the East Coast or having press conferences that we give them all the information that they need. When I got here, I said it's imperative that everything I know and my team knows the county and city needs to know and the elected officials need to know. We should be saying the same number. We should be saying the same thing. It should be no surprises. I think it's working well since I got here with the campfire, there's still every week I just scratched my head and go, why is Sherry or the town columning? And typically it's a comms issue. We will get there, but it's, I could tell you from where I stand, it's one of the most important things that we could do as emergency managers is over-communicate. Included for individual systems, you know, communications key with the individual and how we communicate to them. I'm still trying to make FEMA realize that we can communicate collectively better to the individual. What I mean by that is, I don't know if you don't know this, but when somebody loses their phone and there's an IA's turned on and then the call center from FEMA turns on and it's called a pre-placement interview. That name alone works me, but the very first question is not how are you, do you need any counseling? Did you lose your home? And the next question is, what is your permanent housing plan and will you relocate? To me, that is, I just think it's a wrong way to approach those calls. It's one thing I'm doing here. We had 5,000 or so cases that we're trying to get information back from FEMA because they recalled out and we're gonna call them personally. We're gonna case management through the long-term recovery team and just see is there truly any unmet needs. Group sites, if anybody is in here is involved in group sites, my only advice as long as I'm here, I'm gonna be pushing you to do it and I'll be definitely pushing FEMA to do it is to make sure that we look through the lens of it's not short-term. 18 months is not short-term. Eric says I was here for six months. That's, I feel like I've been here for six years, but I can say what I mean by that is, when you lose everything and you're with everyone that has lost everything, I think it's imperative, I think it's nice and I think it's the human thing to do to have a community center, whether that's a picnic table, a tent, somewhere where people can just walk around and just say, hey, I need a hug. Oh, let's talk about something other than the disaster because right now in these group sites, all they can do is just go home in their trailer, which has no grass, no playground for kids, no dog walks, nothing, but dirt in their trailer. And if you could tell I'm displeased, I am. It's a FEMA program, not a state program, but I can tell you moving forward, it's just something that we have to demand from the federal government. And they're gonna say, we don't wanna make it too comfortable. Well, I don't know what that means, but I know every hotel you go to has a picnic table almost these days. They even have a place to smoke at most hotel places. They have a place where you can meet. They have a place where a dog can use the bathroom called grass. These are simple things, I think, that we can demand because at the end of the day, it is our people, right? This is our program, it's our state. I think the county city, I think the biggest thing is just to be united with us. I've probably speak to Sherry four or five times a week late at night, and I think it's the only thing that keeps me sane to make sure that I'm given, providing her everything that she needs. I do it the same for the town. I've been in the town with Sonoma, thanks Sonoma's here, with the Kincaid fire quite a bit, but it's one lesson's learned as you go to some of these disasters and there's, it seems like a battle, it just can't be, right? We just have to be united on that. I have some indication, I know it was mentioned earlier. I think the biggest lessons learned from 17 and 18 and even when I just reviewed $35 million worth of projects and we sent them off and it's clear that when you get this pot of money, everybody's starting to become innovative, and they're like, yes, we're gonna do this. I encourage all of you out of, what would y'all wanna do now if you had that money? Already have that plan in place, be innovative, be, tie everything together. More importantly, identify the cost share, the biggest issue with hazard mitigation is the cost share. So many people say I'm gonna use DR money for the cost share. Well, A, that's assuming you're getting CDBG DR, and B, that's really not a good cost share because you would never get that within the 12 month timeframe. Anyway, it takes at least two years for those federal dollars to come in. Now that finally my last lessons learned, I know I'm speaking long, Eric, but I had a little extra time, but I think the biggest lesson learned for me as a federal, a former federal employee, now state employee, and a former current survivor, whatever the word is today, is don't depend on the federal government. And I know it's, you already all know that, but don't think that when I is turned on, your individual assistance and housing programs are no longer needed at the county and city level because they won't be, the programs are very small. The programs are, while the Stafford Act is written in a way to be innovative and help the policies that go in place underneath those are everything but that. Example at NEMA, they want the states to now take over their housing mission. Of course they do, and I told them in common, I was like, the state of California would love to take this on. As long as I don't have to go through your procurement rules, as long as I don't have to go by your policies, let me just go by what's in the regulations and the Stafford Act. And they said, well, we'll talk with you. Well, I saw the draft just this weekend and it's basically everything they currently do. And on top of that, we have to do all these other things as a state, like you have a housing plan, which I don't mind, but they want us to identify a group site every county and they want to do it in a month. Yeah, let me bend it, let me go to LA and see how that works for me, right? So it's not. So it's ridiculous. I'll be taking this head on, it's supposed to come out in the spring and I'm gonna be very vocal because if we have to do this, the only thing that it's gonna do for us is it's gonna ensure that we can't house people quick. And at the end of the day, the program is supposed to be about housing. So that's my rant on that. On the rebuild, I think one thing lessons learned is codes and insurance codes at the local codes, as you rebuild, one thing Coffee Park rebuilt extremely well. One thing they did was they quickly realized they have to change the way they built. So they allowed smaller homes on parcels and whatnot and they did that fairly quick. And I think they're up to 70% rebuilt already, which is huge in two years. And they did lose quite a bit. And make sure you constantly speak with insurance. One thing I'm pushing for in the hazard mitigation side is, and I'm speaking to the commissioner of insurances, how do we build back with metrics in mind that, hey, we have this defensible space, whether it's around the county, around the city or X amount of homes are built above and beyond what that code is, how can that drive? Well, A, can that ensure insurance is even allowed? And B, can that actually drop down insurance? And that's one thing I'm pushing for. Cause if you can just imagine, you have a county that has defensible space all around the county, which is beautiful green and whatever, but it's a break, right? Especially if it's a hundred yards and you have homes, 75% are built above and beyond the movie code. I think as assurance commissioner, not that I am, but we should be like, hey, well, they should get a discount, right? Whoever builds back there should be awarded something that should be the incentive to build back. Now that, what I just said has a lot of issues with it, but this is just one thing I'm trying to push because you can't rebuild back as quick as you want if the insurance is not going to be insuring the homes that are getting built back. And by the way, if you disagree with anything I'm saying, just raise your hand and we'll be glad to talk. Have forward for me on public assistance front, which is by far the, it's where the dollars are. One thing I've seen is we don't use mitigation at all. When I got here, the project worksheets for PA were at 2% mitigation. That's just free money on the table. You have category C to G projects and you can get 15% of that. It could be a simple thing, a bankment, you have to hit a flood and hit a runoff and you have to reseed it. Well, maybe you could put hydro-seed and do other things and you can get that $1500 to a $10,000 project. I told my team that I want 25% of all projects to have mitigation identified by January 1. I don't know if we'll get there by January 1, 2020. But I know we're already up to 15%. So speaking, let you all know that is it would be your applicants that we're pushing this to. And now I'm requiring every starting today, every PA project worksheet or every applicant briefing that we do or recovery scope and meeting is on a category to C and G project I want a note to say a notification of what they're doing with 406. And if they say they're doing nothing with 406, I'm requiring them to give me a memo to file to me. And I'll be looking at those personally because my goal and my role is two things. One, I'm the breeze to make sure that we're doing everything on the procurement side so that the state's not losing money. And two, my other goal is to make sure that I'm spending every federal dollar to the penny and putting it back to this state. So that's why I was hired. Also, I wanted to look at PA and really just recovery in general is how do we rebuild using 404 and 406? How do we bring 404 together? How do we ensure that as a state, we're looking this at a holistically approach and working with county, neighboring counties and tying those 404 mitigation projects, dollars together. And I could say if there's a united project that comes across my desk and it's helping a lot of people in the state, whether it's county led or it's tie into something else like a tie into the water, whatever it is, maybe, those are very interesting projects. And they become very competitive because hazard mitigation is very competitive. And so I'm just giving you some tips of how to be very competitive. I'm gonna definitely be asking the team to own the process more and public assistance. What that means is, who has been through a PA incident? I'm assuming most people here. So there's these things called program delivery managers. That's not a thing, it's a person. But they come in and they talk to them what the metric is anymore, seven to 10 applicants and that's their vision and that's all they do. But I can tell you the problem is, FEMA doesn't have enough, they're trying to hire a thousand of them. So when I meet some of the PDMGs, even since I've been here, they've never done this before. And that is the customer service form of how things are being rebuilt. So moving forward, any event that we have, hopefully not this year, it doesn't start to next year, we have a wind event, fortunately, Wednesday again, but is any Lodge project, which is like 127,000 now, I'm gonna have a state PDMG over that. I'm gonna own recovery, we're gonna own recovery. This, these are our applicants, it's not FEMA's applicants, and I'm gonna start with the Lodge projects. It's critical for us to move forward doing that. One thing y'all could do to help me is there's this thing called the Grants Portal. That's one thing Grady mentioned that we redesigned the PA program we did, so if you don't like it, it was more great than me. But not with seriousness, what we did do was create the Grants Portal, which does, it does do one thing very well, it tracks everything. So to me, I don't like appeals, I hate appeals. We should not like appeals. We should get to yes, day one. Appeals take time, it takes money, and more importantly, it's not getting money into the street where it needs to be. So the more that we can track things electronically, you can see exactly what everything is, or what is missing, everybody talks EEIs, EEIs, well it's there, so you know exactly where that is. But what we're not doing right now, what the system can do, and nobody wants to do it, but I'm encouraging all of you to do it, and if you can own this in LA, it would be huge for us, is let's get in there now, before the incident, and put our hospitals and everything in there now. Identify, load in the insurance records, load in the maintenance records, take a picture of the hospital the first month of the year, so where when the incident happens, you have pictures of that. Because if you do all that now, when the incident happens, we can flip money around in days, not months. So I encourage all of you all to take advantage of that. And it's a free system, as of today anyway. Individual assistance, I'm much, so we don't have an IA program, right, at Cal OES. We have CDAN, but we don't have IA. I take offense to that, because I think we have a lot of things in IA. I consider this an IA, this is my vision for Cal OES. There's a circle, and there's a person in it. And anything that touches that person is IA. So our team is gonna be refocused in the next few months to be the expert on SBA, to be the expert on working with CDSS, to understand all those programs. There's gonna be an expert on non-profits. How do we get into that person? So yes, we don't have an IA program, but we have a lot of people in California, 40 million people. So we have a lot of individuals, and I have an individual assistance team, and they're gonna be the experts on how to help you help that person. On the planning side, I personally would never be a planner. I would not do well. I particularly don't like to read plans, even though I do. As I said, I have been reading the debris management plans. San Francisco was four hundred plus pages. But what I can say is that I do wanna make sure that we're planning for a real world events. So what I mean by that is I want the debris management plan that the state's drafting, that we do have people, I think I have somebody in LA, on this county city, been helping me in San Francisco and some others, but I want the plan to be first off all hazards. I think we've covered fire. I think we know where we are with fire. But the most common disaster here is floods. We do have mudslides. I'm from Louisiana. We probably will have a hurricane down south now that I'm here. I think the last one was in the 60s, Eric, in San Diego. Yeah, there'll be a small one, but. But I also want the plan, I want to be all hazards. I want it to be real world. We talk about being resilient. I have the ABCs of what that means, but the C of that is capacity. But even capacity, if you read these plans, is it really meeting what the reality is of tomorrow? A lot of the plans that I've been seeing, it's still based off of the threats that were around in the 60s and 70s and 80s. Well, times have changed. So we have to be looking at those plans as we draft these plans, including housing plans. I'm gonna have a housing plan for the state. I want all of you all to take a look at it for us. And more so, I want you all to leverage what we're doing, start with us. My debris management plan, I have 12 guides to lead me there using the counties to help us, because it should be united, right? It should be the same in-state of all this, but it has to be realistic. The housing plan, you say, you can, I was reading once it was a chore when I first got here and they said, everybody's gonna be after disaster, everybody's gonna be housed into temporary shelters in 30 days. That's false. It's not gonna happen. So be realistic as you're setting these plans up. And that's my C for being resilient. I want for you with the A or B. One other thing we're doing moving forward is, Alex talks about the IDE teams and the PDA teams, is one thing what we don't have here is we don't have teams identified. When a disaster happens, it's basically an email goes out and three people are sent somewhere. And I think there's a better way of supporting you all. So we're gonna have monthly teams identified. And I want you all to know who those monthly teams are. I want my teams to come out to you all. And when they arrive in your county or city, A, that's probably not a good thing, but B, I want you to be comfortable with that. And that's important for me to get out in front of that. Also recovery task force is something we just started, we did it in Ridgecrest. We did it in this recent fires. My team's in Kincaid right now. Recovery task force is I actually leverage the recovery support functions because they have expertise, not just in infrastructure or housing, but also economics. And they know where to find those programs that can help identify your gaps. Their job when they get there and Leia has been, I think every one of them, is can you raise your hand, Leia? So she's been, everyone is to embed in the county or city, help identify where your gaps are, and then come up with a plan when she comes back home, working with the teams and giving you a concrete document that you all can use moving forward. And she doesn't go away. Ridgecrest, she just finished, I believe, saying that all their needs were met. So that's something that we're getting up in front of that. And unfortunately with this new IA program with declaration criteria, I think moving forward, we're gonna have more of these types of events than the federal types of events. So it's important that we get out in front of that. I think that's all I had. I'm gonna have, nope, so debris, two other things. So Eric mentioned, everybody, we're just not gonna come in and clean up. So Sonoma Kincaid had 200 homes, I think. But what didn't rise to the level of their capacity for us to come in. But one thing we're doing is, it doesn't mean we don't assist at the state level. So we brought, I brought my debris manager. He got embedded with the county. He gave him the technical assistance. We brought in a CalRecycle to give them technical assistance, particularly in the contracting side of things. Legal actually reviewed, not only the statement of work, but also the contract to ensure compliance, because at the end of the day, this may be eligible for CDAA. So we wanna make sure that we're assisting you all, if this was you all in that incident, to make sure that there was a reimbursement capacity. We also brought in DTSC. They actually gave them the contracts that were pre-negotiated with CalRecycle DTSC. So we knew going in, if the county selected one of these contracts, it would be eligible for that. They, the Russian river is close to there. And we're making sure using CalFire and some others to make sure that there is no major debris flow that would impact the Russian river that was ongoing last week. And that report should be done this week. But that's a lot of help. So it's a monumental effort on our part, but just because it doesn't rise to the level of a state lead or a fed lead, it doesn't mean that we're gonna be up in front of this. Our director here at the state is very forward-leaning, very forward-thinking. And I treat recovery-like response. Recovery does not start 30 days. And when somebody asks me, so what's that transition? I just cringe at that. It should be, well, it should be minus 180. We should be able to think about all of this stuff as I mentioned already, but more importantly, when two weeks ago, Grady, the assistant director, I was at NEMA, we had this, you know, the power straddle off in the fires, he was sitting with Eric Lamero. He was sitting in the UCG room day one, hour one, and that's how I treat recovery. Recovery and response are united. Recovery cannot work well if we're not united with response. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Kune, to go over the recovery support function. She has eight slides. If there's anything you'd like to ask you that she's got to be more than glad to answer them. So good morning. I'm Kune Sinsen as he said, overseeing the long-term recovery interagency coordination group at OES. We're a relatively new unit, so I have some slides to share with you. I think you've seen this timeline before. It's a FEMA timeline. We use it in a lot of our presentations. What's different about it now is with Ryan's leadership, we've really moved the timeline for recovery to pre-disaster, right? We're gonna start before disaster starts meeting with you, planning with you, the different contingencies and plans. When the event happens, we're gonna be in the state operations center along with our response partners, gathering information and creating that preliminary plan of recovery with you. And then we will stay with you through the three different stages after the event happens all the way until you're self-sustained in recovery. So with that, we have the four different divisions in recovery that Ryan touched on, individual assistance, public assistance and mitigation are programs that you're familiar with, they're Staffordac programs. So we're the new unit with the new division and there's six components to us, six sectors or recovery support functions, as we call them, housing, economic, community planning, natural resources, infrastructure and health and social services. And they're in each a team in the joint field office right now, working with our federal partners and working with the local jurisdiction on the different projects that have been identified. So the six RSFs are very much like the ESFs and they partner with the ESFs. You can see the inter-relationship between the RSFs and the ESFs. We again started the onset of the disaster working with our ESF partners to not duplicate, not hit our local jurisdictions multiple times asking for the same thing but really collaborate with them to support the locals. So what is long-term recovery? Long-term recovery begins and ends with the locals. We believe that here at OES, our job is to support the locals and work with our federal partners, our nonprofit agencies to identify resources for the locals as they prioritize their projects. So goal of long-term recovery is moving towards self-sufficiency. We want the locals, the counties, the cities, the town to be self-sufficient, to be able to help themselves in that recovery process and help them become more resilient. So the key person for us in terms of our partners is the local disaster recovery manager and hopefully each jurisdiction will identify who that person is and help that person engage with us before an event so that we have that partnership, that relationship, that dialogue started before an event starts. Their job really is to represent and speak on behalf of the local jurisdiction in terms of priorities. At the state level, we have state agencies assigned to each of the recovery support functions. Health and Social Services is Health and Human Services Agency. We've got our partners from the Department of Public Health sitting in the back. They lead that RSTEP in terms of setting the priorities of how we help the local jurisdictions with housing, its business, consumer services and housing agency, infrastructure is OES, taking the lead on that one. Natural and Cultural Resources is the Natural Resources Agency Community Planning Capacity Building, the governor's office of planning and research. And we've got some advisors. The FEMA partners or advisors in individual assistance, disability integration, mitigation, EPA and our role development are in the joint field office with us or accessible to us in the joint field office, advising us on different projects and funding sources that we might want to tap into. In terms of activation, when we are activated our goals support the needs of the locals in terms of human, technical and financial resources. So, there's four divisions in recovery. The other three come with money, ours doesn't. So, our goal is to find resources aside from the standard Thaferdack programs such as donations, in-kind services, federal programs that we may not typically know, exist or tap into, even some local, I'm sorry, some state programs that are just steady state programs that state have that you may not be aware of that could be helpful to you in your recovery process. Identifying the challenges and collaborating, in the recovery process there's lots of layers, layers of funding, layers of coordination, layers of planning and our job is to help you through that in terms of project planning and creating timelines, creating path forward in terms of your recovery. In terms of our approach, we have a whole community approach. We believe that every member of your community needs to be part of the recovery process in order for it to be successful. We've reached this conclusion from having recovery programs and processes that didn't include everybody and have learned that that doesn't sit well with the community. So, the people, the people that live there, having a say, the faith-based organizations, the private sector, nonprofits, government agencies, elected officials, really looking at the entire community and asking them what do you wanna look like? What do you see your community looking like after we recover? Not what does the state or the federal government want you to look like? So, whole community approach is very important to us. So, here's a sample, the crosswalk for paradises projects because we are working every day on the campfire and we've talked a lot about campfire today. So, in terms of the six RCS, the kinds of projects that were identified, the gaps, the needs for paradise and then how we're prioritizing them and helping them find solutions, just a snapshot of point in time of what we're doing for paradise. So, what does the end look like, right? What is the outcome we're looking for? Well, for housing, we're looking for a situation where the displaced survivors have accessible, safe, permanent housing. In infrastructure, we're looking at a system that's restored and resilient to future disasters and health and social services. We want to sustain health, disability and social service programs including behavioral health, schools, programs for children. Along those lines with health and social services, we're doing something for the first time in partnership with Mary to stand up a children and youth task force focused on all the aspects of what a child may need in a disaster because they are one of the most vulnerable populations and the impact of a disaster lasts with them their entire life, right? So what can we do collectively to remove barriers to not work in silos? What do those children need? Well, one of the things we've identified are their parents need help. Their parents don't know how to support them. So those kinds of wraparound services to educate not just the teachers and the counselors in the schools but also the parents, the entire community that needs to wrap around those children and make sure that they're recovering. With economic, we're looking at bringing back work. We're looking to bring back the businesses and that's a really complex one. Housing is complex, but economic is too. California has a shortage of workforce in certain sectors. So getting the right workforce to move back when there's a housing shortage is very hard. So each of these assets are so interrelated and it's so complex trying to talk a business into coming back when they can't hire anybody and there's really no one living in the community that would sustain them is very hard. So bringing the business back really is the future of the community. And then the natural and cultural resources, the historical essence of that community. And I always ask, what is the difference in your mind when you think of San Diego versus San Francisco versus Sacramento versus maybe Duke County, right? Very different images come to mind because that's the natural and cultural resources of that community in that county that make it so unique. We have very unique county. And so the natural and cultural resources, RSF's goal is to identify what is unique in that community that needs to be restored, that needs to recover for them to have their identity back again. And then community planning capacity building is really at the core of all of these RSFs, wrapping them all into a recovery plan a path forward for that community. So I think that's it for me. Hey, before I get to any questions, just three things. One, on the individual side, I think when you go through a disaster and you're talking to people, I can tell you this is what they hear. So when you go there, we call them, hey, so these are all the great programs. Have you spoke to FEMA? Have you went to the county? How is church going? They're right now that down and they're gonna put it in their pocket. And they go, you know what? I just lost my house. I might have just lost my dog, my friend, my relative. When I get a chance to deal with that, I'm gonna pull that sheet out in my back pocket. So keep that in mind as you're dealing with survivors. I can tell you that may not happen for a year. When I left St. Benoit Parish, which was totally destroyed and drove, I never cried ever. Big tough guy, right? So, but when I left that parish and I left, I was with my dad and I was getting this great job at FEMA and we went to the Louisiana Mississippi border and I cried when I left the estate. And I don't know why I cried. Other than I knew this, I was never going back, right? So that's tough, right? I was so busy because as soon as the disaster happened, I was helping everyone doing all these things. I never even had time to cope with anything, but that was a year later and I was crying. And my dad luckily didn't say anything for like 15 minutes. So I thought he was gonna make a joke, but he didn't. So those feelings are raw, they're real. And it also goes to the community level as well. We will come in after an event and we bring in all of these state agencies, even before the federal agencies. We're sitting with the counties and we're talking and then there's meeting after meeting. Literally, it looks like that slide deck, right? With the big star in the middle of lines. I think sometimes it's good to go slow to go instead of fast and ensuring that everything that we bring in to you all is coordinated. We have to make sure at the state level that we're controlling those incidences where if there's a HCD meeting for housing, maybe we can tie that into a FEMA meeting with housing at the same time or the RSF, our state partner meeting at the same time. And maybe it needs to be a week later than when everybody wants to meet, right? Because at the end of the day, it's your disaster, right? So, and we're here to support you and to take passion with that. And with closing before comments, I am from St. Bernard Parish, was a beautiful parish. Loved it, 26,000 homes, I believe, on the Parish side. And obviously, you know, it got destroyed. Some people had, I think the lowest amount of water was five feet, most people had 20 plus feet of water. You know, when, you know, going through that, whoever had a house left would hurry up and go home and they would get out of their belongings. Now, granted, most of the sealants fell in, right? Because it was, the water line was above that and everything fell in. So you would get now your plates and your wedding gifts and you would dry them out. And two days later, they were full of mold because it's porous. It's been sitting there for like two or three weeks. All trash, garbage, what a complete waste of time. So we were like, we wish we didn't have a house to go to, right? The people that didn't have a house to go to was like, I really wished we had a house to go to. At the end of the day, everybody lost everything. And what was worse about that particular incident, I know I'm recorded live, but is, you know, the rebuild process was extraordinary slow. It took over a decade to get a hospital in place. We had 16, 17 schools. They have one right now, one of its elementary middle. And a lot of that has to do with, and I can say this as a resident of the parish, was the parish head of vision. And the vision was the day before the incident. It wasn't the future. It wasn't what just happened. So when something happens like this, I always say, take the blinders off. You know, be the community that has 5G, be the community that has a great art museum or something to where when people wants to come back to it's built to not modern day, but it's built to yesterday, to Tomorrowland, a future land I think is Disney World, right? So, and not be tied to the incident. Because every community that's only thinking about building to what it was, it's a long recovery. So, any questions for me? Any questions? All right, thank you, Ryan. We're gonna take about five minutes and then have Riva Feldman, the city manager for the city of Malibu, come up and address us for a moment. Great, thanks. I was just reminded by the league that there actually is a resource. We talked very briefly about whether a resource exists that we've compiled for locals to use in the event of a disaster, specifically in the context of ordinances, the pre-ordinances. And, shortly after the summit that Eric referenced, in early June, there was an attorney-only summit that the league and the association of county councils put together. And from that, there was a playbook that contains pretty much anything you would need in response to a disaster, whether it's ordinances or relevant laws or templates of contracts. So, that resource does exist. It's on the league's website right now. And, any questions afterwards? Feel free to come to Derek or me, but I wanted to make sure you all knew that that is out there for you all to use. Thanks. Before I have Riva come up, I just wanna express how appreciative I am of both her time, as well as Sherry with Butte County, with the responsibilities for running a city and running a county and taking the time out of their schedules to be with us today. It means a lot to listen and learn from you. So, thank you. Good morning, I'm Riva Feldman. I'm the city manager from the city of Malibu, and I'm glad to be here with all of you today. It's always very humbling to come to OES and to hear stories of other communities and what they've gone through. And, my disaster, as horrible as it has been for our community, does pale in comparison to some of the things our other friends throughout the state have gone through. So, I'm gonna give a short presentation on what we went through in Los Angeles last year. Thank you. It was made by my media team, so I'm really appreciative of what they do for us. This map is the fire area of the Woolsey Fire. For those of you who aren't familiar with Los Angeles, the Woolsey Fire started north of the 101, it actually started in Ventura County. And from where the green triangle is at the top of this map to the coastline is roughly 25 miles, give or take, depending on which part of the coastline you're getting to. And the Woolsey Fire burnt that distance in less than 24 hours. It got through to the 101 freeway about eight hours or so, eight to 10 hours after it started. The 101 freeway at that point is roughly 200 feet wide. And so, our firefighters really thought that they would be able to contain that fire and stop it and we had 50 to 70 mile hour winds at that point and it was picking up embers and throwing them two miles ahead of the fire front. And that was where they lost the fire. But I wanna dial back a little as I tell the story, I like to give kind of the week that we were in when the Woolsey Fire started. On Monday, we share a captain with our station, with our neighboring cities, we're a contract city with Los Angeles County Sheriff Department. My sheriff captain had a stroke on Monday and it was the first day of our new operations lieutenant. So I had never met her. So she took the helm when he went to the hospital. On Tuesday, we had an election. I had two city council members that were termed out. I had two new council members elected. We had a new governor and we also had a sheriff race in Los Angeles County and it took about 10 days for that sheriff race to be determined. So as of Tuesday, we didn't know who the sheriff was. We were also under a PSPS watch. It was one of the earlier ones, obviously a year ago. And we in Malibu were very prepared for it. We've been messaging with our community. We were under a red flag watch. We had our EOC open and ready to staff it. My staff was on high alert and we were expecting it. And then on Wednesday evening, we had the borderline rail shooting in Thousand Oaks, which is a neighboring community for us. There were a lot of Pepperdine University students there. Pepperdine is located just outside of the city of Malibu, but it's our school is what we consider it. And we had a student who lost her life there. We had 16 other students who were at the borderline rail during the shooting. I had staff members who had friends and family who were there and who were impacted. So we started Thursday morning dealing with that disaster. I personally was at Pepperdine with them, with their students. And then the campfire broke out and then the hill fire. And you can see that on this map, where that broke out. And we were really concerned about the hill fire. It started in an area that hit the year prior that burned all the way to the coast. And so resources were sent to the hill fire and to the campfire. And then the Woolsey fire broke out. And so we were the last in the state to get resources. And that's a common story that we're now hearing with after action reports that there just weren't enough resources and our folks were calling and calling through mutual aid for hundreds and hundreds of engines and just not getting them. So that was one of the things you'll hear as I go through that was really a challenge. In Malibu, we're ready. We burn, we have mudslides, we flood. These are normal things for us, unfortunately. And we're very well-versed in emergency preparedness, particularly for a small city. The city of Malibu actually has 13,000 residents. We're a long city, we're 21 miles long and we have a very high visitor population of about 15 million people a year. But we talk about emergency preparedness. In the year prior to the Woolsey fire, we had done multiple trainings of our emergency operations center. We had trained with our partner agencies. I had done a test throughout the city of our reverse 911 system. And we really would have said, if you had asked me the day before the fire, if there was a major fire, are you ready? Have you thought of everything? And we really had. We had thought of alternate locations in the city for our EOC. If our city hall building where our EOC is located impacted, I had staff trained which way and that way. Who could do different roles. I had lists of where staff were located. And again, as a small city, I have a small staff. I have a hundred people. And so I thought we were ready and then the Woolsey fire hit. So when the fire started and started to impact Malibu, it was the middle of the night. My personal story was I was also impacted and I evacuated. So as I was evacuating my home, I'm on the phone, waking my staff up, getting them to the EOC at city hall to activate and start our messaging. We have a protocol that when a fire hits or is in the 101 corridor area, we activate our EOC. And then if it starts jumping the 101 and it's traveling, we start preparing to evacuate our residents. So they evacuated 250,000 people in the Woolsey fire area in a very short amount of time. The entire 101 freeway shut down, which left just Canyon roads that feed onto Pacific Coast Highway, which is a state owned highway, two lanes each way in and out of Malibu. And when the evacuation notices came for Malibu, there was a fire front of 14 miles long heading towards our entire city. So they get, we got direction from the fire department to evacuate the entire city. And because of the Hill fire, which was both burning to the north and west of us and the concern from the fire department that that fire would hit the highway, they had us direct all of our residents south or east of Pacific Coast Highway towards Santa Monica. So the image that you see is traffic on the highway. What would normally take people about 20 minutes took people six hours to get out. We are in the EOC and we're sending out our messaging. And again, we have a very robust notification system. We use something called e-notification through our website which allows residents to sign up for emergency alerts. And so we can send that out and get a text or an email. We use our reverse 911 system. We use Nixle. So we were pushing out information in all these different ways. But what we didn't know while we were sitting in the EOC that power had gone out through the entire Wolsey area through the entire city. So that meant that residents who are at their home and it's now light out, we're getting evacuation notices. And so now we roll to what was our next plan in the EOC if this happened was that we would use law enforcement and fire resources to go through our neighborhoods and evacuate people. And that didn't happen because of the number of people that were being evacuated. And the way the fire was traveling is it blocked the access through the canyons into Malibu, which meant that first responders, law enforcement and fire actually had to go all the way around to actually physically get into Malibu and they just weren't able to get there. So a lot of our residents did not get the evacuation notice. And this is a big lesson learned for us that if you don't have Wi-Fi and you don't have cellular phones and you can't call people because nobody has old fashioned landlines anymore what you do, how you communicate with them. And then the challenges of evacuating thousands and thousands of people through one very small area and it took hours for us to coordinate with our partner agencies with CHP, Outrans with Santa Monica with the city of Los Angeles to actually stop traffic coming into Malibu and take over all the lanes of the highway. So these are things that we're working on now in the aftermath to correct and have better solutions for that. And then of course, the fact that we were the third disaster in our state and just couldn't get the resources, they are fast enough. And so as a small city, what we look at now is what can we do, what can we take on as a city to make up some of those gaps? Obviously we're not gonna fight the fire but some of these roles that we've looked to law enforcement or fire to do, what can we actually take off? I put this picture in because it's just one of my favorite photos from the fire. Malibu is actually a rural residential community. We have a lot of horse properties and so evacuating large animals during a disaster is a big, big problem. And again, we weren't the first city in this fire to evacuate so there was the entire Woolsey area is a rural residential area and so there was a lot of issues with evacuating large animals. Some people obviously have llamas but horses and fortunately we do have the beach and so what ended up happening is a lot of those large animals in the incident were actually just brought to the beach and their owners left them there and then the following days we had to figure out how to feed them and transport them. So immediately after the disaster, things that you don't ever think you're going to have to do is first of all, what we found out was that we had residents who divide the mandatory evacuation orders and state and so the day after the fire hit through Malibu and the forthcoming days, we realized there were hundreds of residents who had remained behind. Many of them fought the fire and saved their homes and saved their neighbor's homes. The video that I showed was all taken actually those videos were taken by residents who were there and so it created a problem that we had never really thought through is that we thought everybody would leave and what really happened in our fire was that people stayed and so now how do you help people who have stayed while you're at the same time trying to get your community back open and getting the people who had left back in safely and so it's really a balance particularly again for a small staff. So our EOC was also evacuated with that first day and we were fortunate enough to get the open arms of the city of Santa Monica who opened their EOC to us and we worked out of there for three straight weeks but it really saved us because there was no way for our staff to get in and out of Malibu and even for people to get to Santa Monica was about a four hour trip with the road closures one way. So I really leaned on the relationships that I have with other cities and other city managers and got a lot of support staff so it's something at the city that it's very important to have as relationships of people you can just call on don't wait for mutual aid just say do you have some bodies I need someone who can do the X and I was very fortunate in the cities of West Hollywood and Santa Monica and Culver City and Beverly Hills and Indian Wells Santa Rosa all sent in people and so then getting in to assess what has happened in our city and obviously the first thing people want to know is did my house burn down and we couldn't even get to some of these areas and because of the way our city is laid out it's not a grid, they're not just streets that you can see what was a house there's a lot of flag lots and deep lots and lots with accessory structures like guest houses or barns or garages and so from the street you couldn't tell what had burned if that was the house or not so we were very hesitant in providing that information out there can be something I've really taken away as we need to do that better to get people that information because that human interaction of being able to tell people what had happened to their home or not is very, very critical in those immediate days and then try to repopulate your community where you have complete infrastructure that has been destroyed in the Woolsey fire area the Southern California Edison replaced up close to 2,000 power poles so some people didn't have power for up to a month some people took months to get their communications from Wi-Fi, et cetera back up and running and so these were just really huge challenges that we had to A, help the utilities find a way to get in and do that and then communicate to our residents why you couldn't get back into, you couldn't go to your house and people were saying I don't care if there's power I just wanna go home and then as you saw in the video it started raining and we experienced the flood after fire experience and we understand that's a three to five year thing that we'll have to go through and again you have a community that has just gotten back into their homes of course it was over the holidays the Woolsey fire happened at the beginning of November so some people didn't get back into after Thanksgiving now it's raining, now it's Christmas and now you're talking about having to evacuate again and it's challenging and we really heard the lessons that were learned in Montecito and LA County decided that they would have a mandatory, no evacuations or mandatory evacuations there was no voluntary evacuation discussion when it came to the floods and so we activated our EOC three more times after the Woolsey fire as part of the flood and debris flows and had to do rounds of evacuation and I know I hear it's gonna be windy and hot some parts of California this week but in Southern California we're expecting rain again so everybody now is gearing back up for what we experienced last year and it's telling to be here at OES and talk about funding and relief and whatnot but one of the problems with disaster relief funds is that you only get that there's a declaration that it's not a federal disaster or a state disaster because it's just a lot of rain you're not gonna get money for your municipality to clean up what came off the hills and so last year we spent several million dollars just cleaning up mud that won't be reimbursed for and now something we're expecting for the next few years so I'll let you know how that all turns out but we learned a lot and it's a very humbling experience to go through and to think as government what can we do different how do we do this better how do we think ahead of what could happen and so some of the things that we've taken upon ourselves is we're doing evacuation planning and with different evacuation routes and planning that include figuring out the data of how many residents live and give them food what the ingress and egress is for those neighborhoods and coming up with multiple egress routes if one of them is impacted we've come up with safe refuge areas where we can just send people to get them off the highway and open up roads to get more people out and hold them in a safe refuge area until we can get some time in coordination with other agencies and we're really looking at what we can do as a city to get information out to people and so since the Woolsey fire we have actually purchased through our reverse 911 system cell phone data which we didn't have we only have home phone data and so that gives us the capability of contacting anybody through our reverse 911 system who has a cell phone that's registered in our zip code we also are now fully capable and trained on doing NIA which is the wireless emergency alert system ironically we signed up to participate in that before the Woolsey fire and had a training scheduled for the week after the fire so we weren't able to use that but it's certainly something that we plan on using because not only is it important for us to communicate with our residents but because of the high number of visitors that we have in our community we recognize that in a disaster we may need to do while I talk about what happened to us which was a fire what I think is very important for everybody in California to take away is that it might be the earthquake and that's gonna be much, much worse than any of us have experienced in the fire because in the fire you may actually have an opportunity to evacuate people but in the earthquake we're not and so as government we need to look at how do we help thousands and thousands of people who are stuck and need help and don't have the resources and aren't resilient so we're really having those communication that communication with our residents of how do you become more resilient how is a neighborhood do you help yourself? We're increasing the number of cert volunteers that we have in our city we had always had emergency supply bins throughout our city we've actually restocked them with different things I had never thought to put I-95 masks in our bins but we certainly do now at making sure that those cert members who are in each neighborhood know how to get to them and how to help people and then we purchased megaphones which sounds pretty low tech but I'm trying to think about what do we do how do we help and so we actually in our city hall have 50 megaphones we purchased magnets that go on vehicles and lights that can go on top of vehicles and we trained our staff now to do evacuations of our neighborhoods we did one drill one neighborhood a few weeks ago we're planning on doing them in every neighborhood and it's literally using staff members to drive around and say there's a disaster you need to leave then the megaphones have a siren and the audio capability so I'm trying to dial down to how we can be helpful if we end up being the last disaster in the city or the state on a given day and so we're also really trying to think differently as a city we as I mentioned are a contract city so we contract for law and fire through LA County and I actually came up with an idea to hire a fire safety liaison for our city staff which is a pretty unusual position for a small city and I was fortunate enough to get a retired battalion chief from Ventura County and that's him there and he is meeting one-on-one with residents and doing assessments of their homes giving advice on how you can harden your home helping make sure that their rush clearance is in compliance and really being that interface between the city and our residents where the county fire department isn't able to do it or doesn't have the manpower to go resident by resident and talk to them and so we're really trying to make residents so what can you do? You live in a high fire area what can you do to harden your home? How can you have a safer home? What landscaping is the right thing to have and introducing landscape ordinances that prohibit really flammable materials and all these types of building materials that really can help the homes because we can't change where we live we can't change the fact that we're going to have more fires but hopefully we can teach of how to have safer homes and then the other thing that we're doing is we took on a contract with a firm that does GIS mapping in real time of fire and so using technology that's available and what this system can do is and this is just an example of a fire that breaks out where it's going to go takes into account the weather and the wind and they give me time it'll tell me how many fires are going on in the state and the time so I know where I am and the distribution and it gives us while we're not the ones making the evacuation calls and we're not the ones chasing and fighting the fire it helps me and my staff stay a few steps ahead of what we could be facing that if this fire gets to point X then we're going to have to evacuate what neighborhoods and how much time will I have before it gets to that point and really being able to kind of stay one step ahead of what we need to do in terms of it and then we're looking at what do we do when there isn't power and so obviously we've all been struggling the last few weeks with PSPS issues we did have one shutoff in Malibu two weeks ago for about 24 hours and as we learned in the Woolsey fire we had no power and so we're looking at installing sirens throughout our city the old fashioned air raid sirens we have a funding for the design that the city is funding and the Piper grants to install those obviously that's a multi-year project but it's something we think is very beneficial to being able to alert residents when there's no power we also came out with what we call the point of information stations and one of the issues that we heard over and over again from our residents that remained in the evacuation area was that they didn't have a way of getting information and so again thinking forward this is the earthquake and I have my entire city in town and my visitors and my businesses and employees and people need information and so we came up with a very simple solution of sandwich boards that we had purchased and we have tents and what we'll do is put those in key locations throughout the city shopping centers, churches, fire stations, school have staff go and put that information up on those boards so people can visit get to somewhere and see what is going on and get up to date information and giving people timely information in a disaster and immediately after the disaster is very, very important and one of the lessons that I learned is that even if there's no new information you still have to push out that nothing has changed that people are traumatized people are anxious that it's not just your residents it's all of their families and all of their friends and the entire state watching something and they wanna know what's going on so our new protocol is in a disaster is that every 30 minutes we're actually pushing out information with a time stamp whether something has changed or not and it's burdensome but it's very, very important and a big lesson learned. We've also applied for grants to get some local communication operations for our own staff so what we went through when there were the floods is that I had staff out 24 hours a day dealing with mud and debris but they were in areas where A it was pouring rain and they had a limited cell communication there and they couldn't talk to anybody so we're looking at ways to get these mobile communication systems for all of our staff but also the health residents as well and then just coming up with different ways to message the same. Reverse 911 and you use that to the home and the cell phones and we have our advisory system and we have Nixle and we have social media and we have our bullhorn system and over and over in any way that you can get the same information out and then just keep pushing it out and it's key especially in an evacuation people could die if they don't get that notice and it's something as a local government official I take very seriously that I want to know that people are getting that information but the good news is we're moving on so one year later almost 50% of our burned homes single family homes have come into the planning department and through the planning process so we have 37 under construction and quite a few more of the 181 number represents properties that have gotten clearance for a planning department and are now developing their building plans and from the other departments and so it gives us hope to know that people are moving along but it's a difficult time for community, the trauma and the fact that we keep catching on fire all around us and so the way the winds blow in Southern California is anytime there's a fire inland all that smooth blows out to the ocean unless there's an offshore breeze and so you have a lot of people keep smelling smoke and thinking we're on fire again so it's been very painful and slow and having staff on board who can support those residents who can help people through this really difficult time just by being there and doing what we can as a government and then helping residents become more resilient themselves. That's the end of my report. Thank you for taking the time to listen and I'm happy to take any questions. What we're gonna do is we're gonna hold all the questions until Sherry's done so thank you very much. Gonna take just a minute, Josh, can you come up for a second? Water, coffee, karate, good morning. Thanks all for being here today. I'm referring to this as I wish I knew then what I know now and I wish I knew now what I'm gonna know a year from now because this is a complex process. If I had known now what I knew or if I had known a year ago what I know now we would have got services to our residents much faster. It's a hard, hard thing to learn as you're in the middle of a disaster and we learn something new every day and so I anticipate a year from now we'll have a whole bunch more lessons. Let's see if I can do this. I'm not gonna read you the statistics, you've heard them, you've seen them, you've been inundated by them. Needless to say the campfire was bigger than anything Duke County has ever experienced. Now we thought we had it all together, we have disasters all the time unfortunately but nothing of this magnitude. And what we found out is our state and federal partners, most of them had never seen a wildfire of this size. So we had a couple of statements and this'll make Eric laugh. Throughout the response and recoveries there were times when we'd just sit there scratching our heads saying there's no playbook for this. There's playbooks now but a year ago there weren't playbooks for some of this. And a lot of hmm, never done this before. So we're happy to be the beta site and learn lessons and we're hoping that the lessons learned in this size of a disaster really help regulations, guidelines, trainings at the state and federal level going into the future because I think it was Ryan that said it, FEMA's playbook is not built for wildfires. And so there were times we sat around just thinking this is absurd, what are we doing here? Okay now Josh, I'm gonna play you about two to three minutes of a video that channel 10 did. I wanna start at the beginning and we gotta put up with the five, four, three, two, one. Hey are you tired of the media spinning the truth of pushing false narratives? Yep. Thank you. Go, go, go, go, go. Got Gryptok basically everywhere. This is got potential for a major issue. One year ago a spark at the wrong place at an even worse time turned into a firestorm of historic proportions. We have passed by hundreds of homes burning as well as businesses. Oh my God, the tree's burning right next to us. All those homes gone. I feel the heat now. The campfire burned into the record books as the state's deadliest and most destructive fire ever. The town of Paradise was lost in just hours along with Concount, Magalia and the neighborhoods around them. 85 dead, more than 14,000 homes gone. An entire community burned to the ground. And the fire took everything. One year later the ground is still scarred. The pain is still fresh but this community is determined to rise from the ashes. Seeing what they are accomplishing every single day more and blocks clear, you know? It makes you feel like, you know, it's happening. So people moving on, it's not gonna be the same, you know? The town isn't gonna be what it was. It kind of died that day. It's a blank slate now. It can be anything it wants. We can learn from the past and rebuild much better. It's home. It's home. I couldn't imagine going anywhere else and starting over. I will now, whoops, if I could hit that key, launch into lessons learned that we've learned so far but we know that our story's not over yet. It absolutely takes a village. This slide is not intended to show you all of the partners that came to the table for this disaster and recovery effort but it does show you that it takes the public, private, education, non-profits and faith-based all coming together. No single organization in a disaster this size can do this on their own. And it takes us, Riva and I talked about this. It takes all of us supporting each other because you're right. Mutual aid is not the end all in a disaster this size. It's good for fire, it's good for law enforcement but you're just reaching out and grabbing whoever you can. You have to look behind you because you will be so overwhelmed by what's in front of you if you don't recognize all the good that's been done. We have a lot to celebrate. We have over 700 building permits already a year later. Yeah, we have almost 15,000 homes that need to be built but it's huge and I have to take this moment now. Alex talked about debris, Ryan talked about debris. The program that Cal OES and Cal Recycle put together was hands down, absolutely amazing. Far exceeded anything that we've ever seen. Did the same thing down in our southern areas. Other nature as we know was a bear. And so this got done, what do we have? Almost 13, no, about 12,000 in the state program that were done in just over six months because we have that crazy weather through May. We had snow in the valley, we had floods, we had mudslides. It was pretty insane. And Ryan talked about two times the amount of debris as was removed from the World Trade Center. As I said before, we've been through disasters. We've had, let's see in the past 10 years, I can't even count how many local declarations. We've had eight state declarations and we've had five presidential declarations. Most of those in the last two years. But nothing, nothing like this. And so we have never been needed to access all of the federal programs that are out there. We've worked with our state partners frequently, but we had no idea what the federal programs bought to bear. I'm gonna speak to this. Ryan mentioned disasters are at the local level. We started planning for disaster operations or recovery operations when the fire was still burning. We had tens of thousands of people and animals still evacuated. But Santa Rosa gave us a heads up and Ryan has told us too, you actually need to be planning for recovery before that disaster. We thought we had, we've had fires, we've done recovery without any federal help. There was no way. So we were trying to create this in the chaos of a disaster. We did request mutual aid to help us with recovery and it was denied. I will tell you I regret not pushing harder on that. Our organization, even though we're a county, we're smaller up in Northern California, and these same folks that worked emergency operations and recovery have been working at since the middle of 2016, plus doing their day jobs. And I've gotta tell you, no organization can be on hyperspeed for this many years and remain healthy. So trying to take care of our organization while we're trying to help our residents, which is why we're there, is really a challenge. I believe, Ryan, with all your planning, that we need to have a serious statewide conversation about local capacity for managing large disasters. Not all counties have the same staff and the financial resources, yet we're all expected to manage them the same. Please know as I discuss lessons learned, you're gonna hear frustration. We're still living this. Ryan's over there grinning. Most of it is with processes and regulations and primarily from the federal level. It's not with individuals though. Every one of our partners from the federal and state level has been amazing and some of them have even been with us since the beginning of the event. From what you see up on the screen, start figuring out what that large recovery structure is gonna be when the big one hits your jurisdiction. You can always scale back, but trying to build it in the middle of it, it doesn't work. Let's see. And I'm gonna talk really about recovery, not response. And these are the recovery functions that as the operational area, the county is responsible for if the cities or town can't take these on on their own. And so we and this fire had about a third of the damage done in our unincorporated area. So we had our county hat on and two thirds in one of our towns. And then they came to us saying we can't do this. So we took on and carried that weight for them. As the operational area. So there's no playbook. I heard everyone say there's a playbook. There was no playbook. There might be a playbook now, but you don't know what to ask for, when to ask for it, how to ask for it. And we've learned to ask questions over and over and over of multiple people because what we found is that individuals are trying to be helpful and they are helpful. The rules are interpreted differently by organization, federal or state, and then even at the different levels in those organizations. And so just keep asking questions. So sheltering, Ryan said, we just closed down our last shelter after 12 and a half months after the fire. It's crazy. Be prepared for spontaneous shelters. There were just as many spontaneous shelters as there were county supported shelters. We had the Hell's Angels providing security at a church that was a spontaneous shelter because there were no other resources and someone had a friend of a friend and they came. So just be prepared for it and thank you to anyone who supported us. We had shelters as you know throughout the North State. If you have mass casualties like we did, utilize a family support center. We have never used one of these in the past even though we've lost some lives. It's a partnership with Red Cross and it allows families who lost loved ones to go through their recovery process and privacy. They're not there with the thousands of other survivors. The media is not in their face. It's in a totally separate location and I highly, highly recommend you do it. And to my friends in education, don't forget your office of education. Don't forget your schools. I think, tell me if I'm speaking out of line Mary. They train in the response. They practice. Recovery is a whole nother thing, right? We all got caught a little flat footed. And so be there to assist them as we understand how to go to the state and how to go to the beds for assistance. A priority in the campfire was getting the schools back up so our kids would have that one piece of normalcy in what there was nothing normal in their lives. Donations. There really is such a thing as too much of a good thing. We had semi trucks coming in for months. There was nowhere for all these donations to go. They ended up on street corners. They ended up in vacant parking lots as we, the collective we, every non-profit and governmental entity in our area was scrambling trying to get warehouse space and put in systems and pull in volunteers from all over the nation. At one point we considered asking the CHP to just not allow any semis into California but we realized that probably wouldn't. But we were that desperate, like just don't let them in. We continued to explore options but I am very interested in what other jurisdictions maybe have done in large disasters to manage the chaos because the collective we within the county and our partners are really struggling with what is a system, where do we put all this stuff, how do we manage it. For monetary donations, we are very fortunate to have the North Valley Community Foundation. They set up a fund day one. They then partnered with Aaron Rodgers. You might have heard of him and Sierra Nevada Brewery. So hopefully you all bought your resilience but they've raised $72 million to date. They've given out 27 million so far and they're in for the long haul. They don't wanna give all that money out now. They know it's gonna be needed when the state and the feds are gone. That private money is what's gonna carry us forward. We also had the Red Cross and Salvation Army, other organizations collecting monetary donations and the Red Cross alone has awarded over $40 million within Butte County to organizations supporting our survivors. The county and town made a conscious decision not to get in the monetary donation business. We did not wanna be the ones deciding who gets what money for what purpose and so we were glad to have our partners just take care of that for us. So highly important leverage that private money we work with the foundation constantly saying, no, don't pay for that. Let's get all of the federal and state money, right Brian? Get all that money before we start putting that private dollar and don't waste that private dollar. Let's see, many of you may have set up local assistance centers after some of your disasters. This was so big that FEMA stepped up and actually did the logistics, leased the space for a disaster recovery center and then we embedded our local assistance center services in that disaster recovery center. It was open for three and a half months. It served 55,000 households with over 200,000 visits. So there were days, there were thousands of people waiting in line to get services. Another thing FEMA did under this event was they deployed mobile disaster recovery centers. They went out to some of the larger populated, temporary sheltering areas in Northern California and they provided access to FEMA assistance and some other state and federal assistance too. Throughout this response, the county and town have been completely dependent on our non-profit and private sectors to help with the trauma. The physical health, the mental health, we already didn't have enough providers in our county. We lost one hospital. All of those providers that were associated with that facility have been spread out elsewhere and without them, they're still not enough. There is not enough. The trauma from event this size is huge. As an aside, 400 of our county employees lost their homes out of 2400, so about 20% of our employees lost their homes. Many of the town's employees, one of our board members and all five town council members all lost their homes. So as people are trying to help the residents, they're also dealing with their own trauma. And finally, disaster case management. So this is not even a local jurisdiction function, but I'm bringing it up because it is so critical and Ryan I think teed it up for me a little bit because we are working on this right now. It's my understanding, because I'm still figuring this out. Federal funding goes through the State Department of Social Services who contracts with local nonprofits. Know that I didn't even know that. That's how it all flowed till about a month ago. Your residents don't know that. So when it's not working, they're at your board meetings and your board's saying, what are you doing to fix it? And that's when you figured out, wow, not within my authority, not my sandbox. So the county has stepped up and asked FEMA and State Department of Social Services to consider partnering with the county in this one. Our nonprofit partners say there are not enough trained disaster case managers in the state to help with this event. They're frustrated. They said, you can keep giving us money. We can't find people. We can't hire people. We have what I think Ryan said anywhere from 800 to 8,000 people on waiting lists. The reason no one knows is there's multiple lists and there is no one who has the time and the staff to go through and find out how many are duplicates, how many people have given up waiting and already found their own solution. So we don't know how many people are out there and we're trying to partner with the state and with their nonprofits to support them and even provide case management if we need to. So every disaster is different and some of these may not apply to your areas. So I'm going to go through them quickly. We had a watershed task force because our burn area is at the top of some of the more critical watersheds for the state of California. So they serve us locally but they serve all of our neighbors to the south including all the water that goes all the way down to Palmdale out of Lake Oroville right now. So we immediately knew we were going to have problems. We heard from our fellow counties and cities about debris flows. We were hoping for rain, we got too much rain and so we immediately started working the state and federal partners gave us authority, found funding, got the California Conservation Corps to come in, placed over a hundred thousand feet of waddles in critical watershed areas. And if they hadn't, I don't know what our watershed would look like because as you know, we had weather, freak weather for about three months after that. We also got a heads up from Santa Rosa. I guess we are the second event to have this happen where the fire impacted water systems to the point that there's benzene and BOCs in the systems, not because the water's bad but because of the chemical compounds in the pipes. If they had not given our water districts a head up, heads up, I don't know that they would have known that was an issue. They probably would have replaced some pipes and started pumping water. So we were glad Santa Rosa gave us a heads up. It was a frustrating journey. We had dueling scientists. We had academia and we had state scientists and we had people who were retired scientists and everyone had an opinion and none of them matched. And so the public lost trust in what's the right testing to do. How do I know my water's safe? The state did finally step up. I'll get it wrong. I think it's the division of drinking water and CalEPA did step up and issue guidelines for testing but they didn't want to. They kept saying it's the county's job and we kept saying not our area of expertise. So it's going forward now but it was a long haul. So this is one where I hope there's a playbook now. There are state standards for how you test if your water systems are impacted. And the other play, other piece that not everyone will have is the timber and biomass area. Our area is heavily forested. So we have challenges with hazard trees, with leftover stumps from logging, with slash and with vegetation that grows back with a vengeance after a fire. It's so pretty, right? Oh look, everything's turning green. And then oh my God, there's vegetation everywhere. So this is a key task we're working on. We have urgency ordinances in place to relax codes so that log decks can go in areas that they weren't allowed before. We have processing sites that can be used for chipping and the town is even working with the state, with CalEPA and CARB on allowing what's called an air curtain burner which I didn't know what that was till a couple of months ago to burn some of that slash and vegetative waste in an area that's not typically allowed in the state. So your partners at the state, I'll tell you, they do everything you need to get her done. We lost a number of public facilities. We lost a historical bridge, fire station, public worksyards, offices, vehicles, equipment. We had damage to our landfill, which we needed, right? Because we got debris. So we've been working through all of that. County roads were damaged from the fire. They're damaged from fire response. They're damaged from debris removal. They'll be damaged from hazard tree removal. It's really key with your roads, document, document, document at each phase. You can't say here's what it was before the fire. Here's what it is at the end because what component, the funding comes in different components. So make sure you're documenting. We're using a tool, I think it's a FEMA tool, yeah? So that we know we're collecting the right data and have the backup because that on top of debris is the place you can get into some arm wrestling for repairs and replacement. We still have damaged roads that are the single evacuation route for some of our rural communities that are damaged. Makes it really critical, excuse me, to get roads back. And then damaged utilities. We are just starting, I'm gonna grab my water. We're just starting to, Eric, thanks. We're just starting to look at dig once ordinances. I recommend if you have not looked at under grounding, excuse me. You may wanna consider it at least in your major evacuation routes. So we are considering a dig once policy. The town has already adopted one. And we're not saying do it everywhere but one of the key things that gave you those horrible pictures of people trapped and cars burning was power poles went into the roads. So look into it if you haven't, be here. Ah, temporary housing. So we could probably write a book on this. Here's where I really wish I knew then, what I know now. And again, frustration is with regulations, not people. It took us months to understand why temporary housing wasn't moving forward. What's so hard, find some property, put some mobile home units on it, let's go. Well, we finally figured out the secret. There's four things that have to be in place for temporary housing to work. One is it has to meet FEMA requirements. That, yes, I know I'm being recorded, are absurd. They don't work in more rural areas. They want large properties near infrastructure and services. The only large properties we have in Duke County are out in the middle of Ag Land. They are nowhere near infrastructure and they are nowhere near services. Many of them are in floodplains. Not the whole property, might be 3% of it. But if there's anything that says floodplain, that property's no good. So understand the FEMA requirements. We did not know what they were. It has to meet local land use requirements. And if not, you need to get some urgency ordinances in place if you want to make some sites work. You have to have a willing property owner that has the legal authority to lease the property to FEMA. And yes, there's a story behind that that I'll be happy to share one on one. And there has to be public support and political will. This is where Ryan got into the NIMBYism. So what we're gonna do, because very few of our sites met all four of those requirements. In any future disaster that requires this temporary housing mission, we're gonna require a meeting with FEMA and state staff to educate them on local land use regulations and authorities. They didn't understand why I couldn't tell the city what to do. But I have no authority within city jurisdictions. We'll request that all decisions get made in meetings with local jurisdictions at the table, not at some field office down here in Sacramento where local input isn't always included. We will provide now that we know FEMA's requirements, we're gonna provide a free identified list of appropriate sites in all of our jurisdictions that might meet FEMA requirements. And that have already been through a public process, right? They've already been approved for a subdivision. They just haven't been built out yet. And then we will also ensure we have the right staff in place working with the mission. We put someone who understood housing out of social services. Someone who has land use knowledge and authority to say, here's what we need to do to get that site approved. We have so many urgency ordinances in place now to deal with temporary housing solutions, including FEMA sites. And when it was asked, do we have copies of ordinances? Ours are in chapter 53 of the county code. Feel free to use them. We have probably put everything in urgency ordinance by now. There is a playbook for fire debris removal and other people have gone into this, so I won't spend a lot of time on it. Here's some key lessons. Residential is different than commercial and public property, different processes. So don't think you have it all covered with your residential process. Make sure and sorry, Alex, make sure FEMA and Cal OES have reviewed and approved any ordinance you put in place and get it in writing. We had a snafu with a change in federal staff. We had put something in place that we all thought was good, Cal OES, FEMA and the new FEMA person came in and said, no, that doesn't cut it, it'll make you ineligible. He was probably right. So I'm glad he caught it now and not when I'm getting an OIG audit five years from now. But what it did is we allowed people to go back on their property even if there was fire debris. They just had to stay a certain distance away. We then had to say, nevermind, pack up, you have to move off your property. That's what got us in non-congregate shelter for 12 and a half months. Those people just on Saturday were able to finally move back to either their next temporary staff or a permanent solution. So just make sure you are in lockstep. Your attorneys are in lockstep with state and federal attorneys on any ordinance you put in place. The local health declaration. It is required. Not all health officers believe it should be. So I recommend you talk to your health officer. That's at the county level and know where their head is on this because you don't wanna start battling over this when the disaster has happened and you have debris you need to clean up. So you need to know what their position is. I will tell you the health officers in the state of California are trying to get the federal law change that ties debris to a local health declaration because they don't believe it's the right tool. You may also need urgency ordinances for temporary sites for concrete, for metal, for contractor-based camps, for laydown yards, all kinds of things I never had to know about and now I do. The right of entry program Ryan mentioned, it's on you as locals. It is a heavy lift. It took 60, 6-0 employees at the peak of our right of entry program and it's still in operation today a year later and we don't have 60 employees in the county that have the knowledge needed because you're running the state's right of entry program and you're running your county alternative program which means some scientific types have to be reviewing reports and saying yes, does that soil sample say it's clear now? We use county staff, we use retired annuitants, we use contract staff from the California Environmental Health Association, mutual aid staff and then our Alliance for Workforce Development which is our local workforce group. That right of entry program cost us about $2 million. That was just a staff it and take in paper and process it. If you run a local landfill know your capacity. We had to run a separate operations for debris so it didn't impact our franchise haulers and our local customers and know that private landfills will not be happy that public landfills are taking debris because they want the business so there's a lot of politics that come in too. Be part of establishing traffic plan, the state and federal government do not know what your traffic patterns are. They didn't know that our traffic goes way down in the summer because all the teachers aren't commuting from Chico to Oroville and all the Chico state students are gone. So we help them understand ramp up in the summer, hit it hard and get out of the way once school comes back. Let's see and use lessons learned by other jurisdictions. We learned from Sonoma and Shasta. We learned with the state because they learned what not to do in Sonoma. We all learn together. There is no playbook for hazard-free removal unless I'm missing something, no? Do we have a playbook Alex? No, no, no playbook. It is an allowable cost. You heard, huh? We're writing, we are, we're writing one. It is an allowable cost so don't take no for an answer. Do it with your fire debris. Even if it takes that time, we're gonna spend another $2 million doing right of entry for trees now and you talk about frustrating traumatized people already. What do you mean? I already gave you that information. It's gotta be a whole new sign form, has to have the backup documentation. We are currently approved for hazard trees in the public right of way and on private property that could impact the public right of way and what we are doing on all of your behalf that have trees in your jurisdictions is we are really advocating for FEMA to cover trees on private property that will fall on orphan roads and an orphan road is a road that's not publicly maintained but it's used by your residents as part of their traffic circulation in their community because they are just as much at risk from one of those falling hazard trees on those orphan roads as they are on a public road. So we're still waiting, right? We'll see what happens but we will continue pushing for that and hopefully have a playbook with how do you justify those orphan roads? Again, you'll need urgency ordinances, it's a mandatory program and as I said another $2 million for that early. All righty, this slide makes my stomach drop every time I see it. So this is from Robert Eiler who's a professor at Sonoma State University and president of Economic Forensics and Analytics. I have to give him a plug because I stole a slide. This shows the housing challenge viewed county faces in contrast to those seen in other counties in Northern California that have experienced catastrophic wildfires. Now we lost 17% of our housing stock in the campfire and we had a one to 2% vacancy rate to begin with. Look at that line. It's gonna take a decade at least to bring it back up to where it was which wasn't even sufficient for the population at that time. It's not all doom and gloom though. We have private contractors have stepped up. They are building houses that they had not planned on building for years down in the valley for those folks who either don't have the ability to go back to the burn area or they're too traumatized. They don't wanna live back there. So housing stock as much as the private sector can do is coming back. There's funding in the state budget and state legislation as you know to fund infrastructure to support infill so within the city of Chico especially and hopefully in Oroville. There's some money that will widen those roads so subdivisions that have been sitting there waiting to be developed can be developed. And some jurisdictions did receive authority to waive CEQA under certain conditions for residential development. It's not a blanket waiver. State requirements for solar on new houses have been waived in the burn area and private nonprofit and faith-based organizations are really, really working on solutions for those underinsured and uninsured that have no, they have nothing right now. We did adopt appendices to the building code so we now allow for tiny homes or little houses as those people from the south home like straw clay construction, straw bale construction and emergency housing. And once CDBGDR comes out which probably is not till 2021 that will be what we will be looking at for a lot of our low income housing. We're almost done here. The economic and business recovery task force is a partnership with a bunch of our education nonprofit economic development partners. They're focused on regional economic impacts because just the town of Paradise burning down has widespread implications for businesses elsewhere. They are looking at additional workforce for high demand occupations and they have developed an action plan that's been shared with governor and with our legislators. Three really key recovery support functions. And I think Alex and Ryan touched on this too. Cost recovery for large disasters is complicated. Get a consultant, add staff, the paperwork will vary you. And Ryan, I'll believe it when I see it that it's all gonna be computerized. We'll love it. Key lessons learned. Don't accept the first answer you get. You will get different answers. Keep asking until your gut says, okay, I think this is it. Don't take no for an answer. Get it in writing even though that doesn't guarantee the answer won't change and follow federal procurement procedures. We know that from all of the disasters we've been through but we found a lot of our partners saying, well, I just wanna hire this person. Oh no, you need all these things attached to the contract. You've gotta go through the right procurement. And we wouldn't be where we are today without our federal and state legislators. We all got together school districts, cities, special districts, the county and we developed one legislative platform about two weeks into the fire because we all needed property tax, right? So let's not hit up our legislators with multiple requests. So we built a single platform and you need your strong relationships with your legislators and with their staff. Their staff are key. They have been so amazing. Probably heard, we asked for backfill of property taxes for multiple years and we got it. The town and county contract with Cal Fire for fire services. So we asked for some fire contract support and we asked for regulatory and funding support for permanent housing solutions. Under the federal request, it was reduce or waive the local share of costs. Someone showed, I think Alex said it's six and a quarter percent. As we look at tens and tens of millions of dollars, six and a quarter percent's a big number. We have received a reduction that's down to about two and a half percent for categories A and B, emergency response and debris. And we are continuing to ask for that for roads because the amount of damage to our roads and the local cost share will be cost prohibitive. We've also asked for additional supplemental funding for a number of the federal agencies that will be supporting recovery efforts because we don't think their current appropriations are gonna be enough. And I have to thank all those people up on the screen who you probably know all their faces. Every one of them has worked miracles for us. They have worked together. They are not all from the same political party. They have worked together and they are heroes. Even if they weren't putting the fire out, we wouldn't be where we were without them. And finally, information, Joint Information Center, whether it's virtual or physical is key. We work together, state, county, town, feds on common messaging if it crosses jurisdictions. We do our own thing if it's just about our jurisdiction but we keep each other in the loop. So there's no surprises. We did create buttecountyrecovers.org website and Paradise created makeitparadise.org. The recovery website is all things recovery that make it paradise is really about their vision for the long haul. So the county is doing all the recovery efforts on their behalf so they can basically reinvent themselves. And we message in multiple ways. Riva said this, we lose communications in every disaster. We have people who already aren't connected to technology. We have what we call the black holes of communication in our foothills. There is no cell service. People's phones are voice over IP. Power goes down, Comcast line burns. There's no communication. So our communities are now looking at ham radio. They're all setting up their own ham radio systems. And so it takes one call to one person from the EOC or the sheriff or fire and then that word spreads. On that note, oh, wait, one more. Bec the unexpected. It's really hard to bring mutual aid in when you have no place for them to stay. I always laughed. I would open my door at midnight and there'd be this knock and I'd say, Jack, yeah, Sherry. You'd open the door. Hi, nice to meet you. Here's your room. Here's your bathroom. Okay, see you in the morning. Perfect strangers coming in our houses but we had no place else to put them. So we're gonna create a registry of county employees that have the capacity and willingness to house mutual aid if needed. Or you need to be ready to do base camps. State and feds know they had to build huge base camps. There were no hotel rooms. There were no mobile homes. There was nothing available. There's also turnover at the federal and state levels. And I understand why. These are folks who've been away from home for a while but it's hard. It's hard. It's not a smooth transition. It takes time to bring them up to speed. Time you don't have. It's emotionally draining because then you gotta relive everything to let them know what the local picture is. This'll make, I think this'll probably make Eric laugh. Tom's not around. Tom Graham, you listening? They have been so patient with us. They've used a lot of A-words to call us names. And we've been called assertive. And we've been called aggressive. He's over laughing. We've been called advocates. The thing is that's our job. If we're not advocating for our residents, who is? And I appreciate and I respect that our partners have to push back as much as we're pushing on them because none of us want audit findings. None of us wanna have to pay back a bunch of money. And so there's this respect that these are our roles. This is what we have to do but we respect if we can't get everything we need and they respect that we gotta push and ask. So be an advocate. And then urgency ordinances, you get the picture. There are so many urgency ordinances. We have adopted an urgency ordinance at almost every meeting for the last 12 months. So be prepared and feel free to use any. Now Ryan asked me to talk about recovery support functions. Thanks for putting me on the spot. Probably the thing I know the least about. I can tell you they came in in December when we were in the middle of response. And so I think we've learned a lesson. Don't send these folks in when people are in response because we didn't know who they were. Why were they there? Who are these people? Why are they bothering us? We don't have time for this. And they sat there wanting to help, wanting to help and we couldn't even engage. Or they'd try to engage us and we had fire brain and a month later we'd go who are you? What are you doing here? Why are you here? It is an amazing amount of resources that the federal and state governments will bring to help you. Try to learn what it is they'll do for you. And you say I have this need and then they say here's some funding options you can look at. They don't have money but they can try to connect you to money. The town has really benefited. I think Pune showed that list. The town as the county was taken care of all the recovery immediate needs. The town has been able to do a full envisioning process, identified the projects, state and federal RSFs helped them find the funding sources for it. So it is a beautiful model that the town has really utilized and I think it's shown success. And it's one that the county still hasn't been able to step up and take advantage of but I'm hoping soon that we'll get there. I know we're finally, we're starting to meet and identify projects. So and my understanding is it's never all six functions have never been stood up before in the state of California. So it's been a learning experience for all of us. So on that note, it's been a hell of a year. Right, Reva? Eric, Ryan, Alex, yeah, yeah, it's been a year. Thanks for attending and listening to the litany of lessons. I hope it was helpful. We have so much information. This was a year put down into about 35 minutes. Call us, my email is on the PowerPoint, Eric sent PowerPoint out, reach out, we are happy to share anything that we've learned, anything that we will learn in the future. So have a good one, guys. Thank you, Sherry, for that. I can ask, Sherry, if I could ask you and Reva, maybe you both join us at the table in the front. Put you both under the microscope for a little bit and try to take any questions from here in the room as well as online that folks may have for you. So I'll get it started. What is knowing what you know now? What is the first thing you're gonna do when it happens next time? We don't have sufficient staff, our organization is done. And so we have to go figure out what are those resources. Of course, we gotta get done with this one. Or who we can plan as the problem. Likes aren't working so much. I don't think there's one thing that you can do. I think it's stepping back for a moment and gathering yourself. I actually have a checklist that I keep with me of what to do in the first hour so that I don't forget any of these very important things that you can forget when chaos starts because that's what happens and then you don't get out of chaos. So I think it's being prepared and thinking now in blue skies what you can collectively put together so that when it's not blue skies you're not thinking on the fly. Take advantage of what I've been through or butte County has been through. I have the advantage of having worked in the Tubbs Fire and EOC and learning what Santa Rosa went through and they were a year ahead of me and I just would call the city manager and say, what about this? What did you do for this? And not trying to reinvent everything. So I hope that answers your question. And I did just want to say that I was the only speaker that didn't thank OES for the debris removal program. It really was an amazing success. And last week, our final property got into compliance for the opt out program. So we'll have a hundred percent compliance without doing any of these. And just to clarify my plans on recovery because that was the piece that we were not completely prepared for. Let's go ahead and hold on to that microphone. Do we have a question in the room? I always have a question for the audience. So Ben, just because I know you, I think I spent more time with you than you might in this room over the last month just in meetings. Just going to, so just listening to what you heard today, like what is your, I wouldn't say so much question, but what's your takeaway? Oh, actually bring it in. I think one of the questions I initially had was, how do you measure success without how long the event is? What were the metrics? What were the things you kind of used to check back in? Are we moving forward? Because I think for an event this size, this complex, you get that tunnel vision. It's just okay, the debris and the housing, but how do you kind of keep on measuring and saying we are improving? That would be for the next one. So right, this has been so big with limited resources that you're right. We're basically, we need to get debris done and then what's the next thing? Looking 10 and then for itself, we're not there. That's what I would hope that we then, when we finally have time to debrief, and I'll tell you, we haven't even done our after action report yet. It's been a year. We did one meeting and I think we have another one in January, but staff is 24 seven on recovery right now. So plan ahead. I think it almost doesn't matter what you've achieved because for those people who have been displaced and aren't in a home any year out, nobody is back in their home. They didn't rebuild. They moved on. They're in another town. Their children are in different schools. And so for me personally, it's very hard for me to say we've achieved anything. Yes, we've done a lot. Yes, we're in compliance with debris removal. Yes, we got through the winter storms. Yes, we've passed a lot of ordinances. We've had hundreds of meetings and town hall meetings, but until everybody has a home again, that that's the success for me. To both of you, we've set up a construct of emergency management in California. Our activities are generally focused on coordinating directly with the counties that we refer to as operational areas. They in turn work to support gather information from the jurisdictions within their area. I think certainly I think in both of your cases, that probably didn't happen exactly the way that construct is set up. And maybe for better or worse, that's fine, but I'd like to maybe get some perspective from both the county and the city side in terms of how it's supposed to work, how it does work, maybe what we need to be thinking about as city and county folks listening. I think when you're in the midst of the disaster, you're just thinking of the, it's a triage, right? So you've got a problem ahead of you and how are you going to solve that one problem in that moment and then you move on to the next problem? For me, I'm very relationship based. I'm very fortunate to have very strong relationships with everybody in the county, on the state. And I'm fairly fearless that I don't have a problem saying someone get me the governor's phone number. I need to get something from him and then I pick up that phone and I call. But not everybody operates that way. And so I think it's having folks from your department or wherever it needs to be showing up and saying, what can we do to help? What is the gap? What do you need? Because we're just worrying about problem A that's right in front of us in that given moment. I would say it's not a clear cut answer. So in the case of the campfire with a town that was destroyed and was living out of buildings in Chico, we as the operational area in the county trying to do everything we were doing in response and then in recovery, it took both. It took that standard communication for certain things. I think more in emergency response and in recovery, I think it's been really important that the state has direct communications with the town. So it's not a one size. And I think the key thing we've all learned is let's keep each other in the loop just so we don't have any missteps or get two different answers. But otherwise, I think we all have to just follow our gut in the event. I don't think you can just draw this little diagram and that's the way it needs to be. Thank you for that, Pune. Talked a lot about the tremendous weight on you as you were trying to respond to this event and the early stages of recovery. One of the things that was really hard for us as the state and federal partners was not to step in too quickly and offend you by leaning in when you weren't ready and or stay back when you were ready to engage and then we weren't at the table. So in terms of all the other counties, what would you advise us in terms of how to best engage with you so that we can come to the table at the right time, not too early and not too late with all the other counties if they ever had an event? That's a great question. So I have to tell you, one of the problems with the campfires, we all have fire brain and so my memory and my recollection and chronology are just all messed up. I think, if I remember correctly, what happened is just suddenly one day I got reached out to by someone named Joan who said, hey, we're in town and we're here to join. I'm like, who are you? Wait, I gotta go. So I think it's a more, maybe it's a slower pace. It's being really clear on what you bring to the table so that we can say, okay, here's when we need that to come in. And I think it was our lack of understanding of what this resource was and the fact that it was being stood up for the first time in the state and our lack of ability to even retain anything in our brains at the time. So I think it might take a few conversations before a whole flock of folks come to town for us to be prepared because we're the ones that weren't able to be a partner in that, the town much more so than the county was. I just wanna echo what she says. So in the immediate disaster and the aftermath of it, you're talking to hundreds and thousands of people every day, you're also not sleeping, you're also probably displaced. And so you can't remember. I mean, I have so many business cards and people give me, and I don't even remember having the conversation. And so it's reaching out and then reaching out again or asking for someone on my staff that you can follow up with because if you try to follow up with me on that given day, I might have had 75 phone calls and I'm never gonna get to you. So I think it's being persistent and remember that the people you're trying to get a hold with, a hold that are just overwhelmed with tasks and responsibilities. I think one other bit of advice for folks in the room and watching online is when you're sitting in either Riva or Sherry's seat and you have somebody, and I say this with much respect because we have some phenomenal partners with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, especially out here in California. But when somebody from FEMA shows up on day one or day two of your event and wants to sit down and meet with you, one of the things I would ask you to respectfully ask of them is I am happy to meet with you. Let's get Cal OES in here as well because what happens sometimes is we start going down a path, perhaps a good path, but it's one that we need to collaborate and coordinate with our federal partners so that we can ensure that at the end of the day we're meeting your needs with all available state and federal programs. So we have some, FEMA's got some tremendous resources, a lot of personnel that move into the field quickly. We work to be with them, can't always happen. So we just ask you if that person wants to have that meeting with you, happy to meet with you. Let's get Cal OES in the room too so that we can collaborate together. Would you agree? Sure. And document, document, and then document some more and then make copies of that and give them to somebody else. Yeah. All right, any final questions in the room? Chris, is there anything online? Brian, can I have the last word? No, you can have the last word because I'm about to thank you. So first off, thank you to Sherry and Raven. I promise I'm gonna get to you with my team, Leia. She's my task force. I don't know, you all realize that, you know, we have a little, another PSPS event happening and it may impact over 250,000 people and it looks like it's just starting Wednesday. So as we were sitting here, Eric is managing that entire incident for the state. So I just wanna thank you, Eric, for that. That's all. Thanks. I have one last tip that I like to leave everybody with is that when you don't have power and you need information, you can get in your car and listen to the radio. If you do not own a crank radio, you could always get in your car. Thank you for that. Sherry, any final words from you? No? All right. Then that concludes. It's called it rain, it's just rain. And as we said at the beginning, your feedback in this process, your feedback is important. So let us know what else you wanna hear about. We are hoping to hold three more of these seminars from January through June with the anticipation of having another emergency management summit in the summertime next year. So let us know what is that content on the emergency management response recovery arena that you need to learn more about, talk more about, let us know and we'll use that again with our partners from CSAC, the league, the Institute of Local Governments to make sure that these are as useful as they can be for you. So thank you everybody in the room and online for joining us today. Eric, except I just remembered something. And Sherry has one final thought. Sorry, sorry. I have thrown out a proposal that I don't know if it will get legs when I'm throwing it out to you as my peers. If you're familiar with Cal Fire and the auto aid mutual aid program, they have incident command teams, right? That have people from different jurisdictions that then go to an event when it gets too large for the local jurisdiction to handle. So having had as many disasters as we've had and having the same people working the EOC and recovery, I would love to see statewide EOC incident command teams. I would love us to partner with city special districts, schools, counties to build those teams, to work together to practice where we can go into anyone's EOC. I would say the EOC director always should be the local person, but let us come in and be the plans chiefs and all of that. I know none of us have any spare time, but I think from what we've experienced that would be a huge, huge thing for us to do. So thank you for. That's a great recommendation and something that is on our to-do list here at Cal OES to work in partnership with the locals. So thank you for that recommendation. Ryan, you've got the last word. Thank you. So regarding what you just mentioned, my former right when I left FEMA, I was a director of the National Qualification System. So that whole job was to get out in front this logos and states to quantify that. So to what you just mentioned, they released the EOC side of the house earlier this year. There was over a hundred positions and I haven't had the chance to sit down with the director and the executive team to pitch this to the state. I do plan on doing that tomorrow with the director in the plane. I'll have some time with him. So I'm gonna ask him. I think it's a good idea not only to serve that need, Sherry, but just, I mean, I don't know at the state level, how many operations chiefs do I have? I shouldn't know the answer to that. I should know the answer of how many IE branch chiefs I have within my own recovery unit. How many people are qualified have done that. A lot of what we do in individual assistance, other components of Cal OES serves those needs. So it's one thing I wanna bring to Cal OES, it's great, but it would actually address exactly what you just mentioned. So I'll keep everyone here informed of what that looks like. Thanks.